‘Rise’ Keeps It Real for Theater Kids

NEW YORK — Josh Radnor stood backstage in a Brooklyn auditorium. Breathing: audible. Expression: agonized. “Please let this not suck,” he whispered.

Radnor, best known as the I in “How I Met Your Mother,” was in character on this late December day as Lou Mazzuchelli, or Mazzu, the high school drama teacher at the center of “Rise,” the midseason NBC show that debuts Tuesday. Based on “Drama High,” Michael Sokolove’s 2013 nonfiction book about a visionary Levittown, Pennsylvania, teacher, Lou Volpe, the first 10-episode season follows the permanently rumpled Lou from the moment he lands the drama job, beating out a better-qualified fellow teacher, played by Rosie Perez, to the opening night of his first musical: “Spring Awakening.”

Another man might have started out with something easier, perhaps a “Bye Bye Birdie” or a “Seussical.” Not Lou. “Which part did you like best?” Perez’s Tracey Wolfe asks bitingly. “The abortion, the teen suicide or the incest?” This goes a long way to explaining Lou’s backstage prayer.

Given the high school setting, the ingénue cast and some show tunes, you’re forgiven for thinking that “Rise” sounds a lot like “Glee,” the Ryan Murphy glitterbomb about a show choir that ran on Fox from 2009-2015. The showrunner of “Rise,” Jason Katims (“Friday Night Lights,” “Parenthood”), likes “Glee.” He likes “High School Musical.” He wanted to do something different.

“The mantra is to always keep it as realistic and honest as possible,” he said, speaking in his office above the Greenpoint soundstage where “Rise” shoots its interiors. So is “Rise” kin to “Friday Night Lights,” another show initially based on a sociological deep dive, with rehearsals in place of football practices, performances standing in for championships? “That’s fair,” Katims said.

“Rise” began when theater producer Jeffrey Seller (“Hamilton”), now making his first foray into series TV, read an excerpt from “Drama High” in The New York Times Magazine in 2013. He bought the book. It made him cry. But the rights had already been sold. A few years later, when he’d joined up with veteran producer Flody Suarez (“8 Simple Rules,” “The Tick”), he learned that those rights were again available. “I handed Flody the book and I said, ‘This is what I want to make into a TV show,'” Seller recalled.

At the same time, Katims had been looking for a new project, another way of “dropping down into the middle of a town and living in that town,” he said. He’d been pitched soccer shows, baseball shows, other football shows. He’d declined them all. But a show built around a high school drama program, that he could work with. (In fairness, there is a surprising amount of football in “Rise.” Old habits.)

He and the producers decided that unlike a “Glee” or a “Smash” or a “Fame,” “Rise” wouldn’t be slick or satirical. There would be no fabulous guest stars (“I don’t picture Cher showing up,” Suarez said with a deadpan), and the kids wouldn’t be mistaken for professionals.

“We really wanted to make it feel like these were real kids,” Katims said. “That some of them struggle with acting and struggle with lines and struggle with pitch.”

Work on “Spring Awakening” occupies the entire first season and it takes more episodes than you’d think before the kids start singing in any goosebump-inducing way. (If the show is picked up, the fall episodes will work toward a play, the spring episodes toward a musical.)

At the Greenpoint studio, the set crew has built a soundstage of a real high school auditorium in Westchester, detail-perfect down to the nubbly red seats and worn carpeting. The actors fooling around between takes looked a lot like actual high school actors, singing to themselves as they pulled up their knee socks and fixed their hair.

“It’s how young we are,” Damon J. Gillespie, 23, who plays a heartthrob tenor, joked. “We haven’t been ruined yet.”

Auli’i Cravalho, the 17-year-old “Moana” star who plays a student with a troubled home life, felt that the show echoed her own teenage experiences. “The characters are growing and evolving and changing all season,” she said. “It feels authentic.”

No one would accuse “Rise,” set in a fictional Rust Belt town, of glossing over teen issues. “We deal with issues of class, we deal with issues of teenage pregnancy, we deal with sexual abuse,” Katims said. Does that mean that “Rise” might be too real? “It’s a show that is very uplifting,” he promised. During the Television Critics Association Press Tour in January, Katims kicked up an internet fuss when he revealed that in one instance he’d departed from real life, changing the character of Lou from a closeted gay man, which Lou Volpe was for many years, to a straight one. Katims told me that in setting the show in 2018, the story of a closeted man would depend on “clichés that didn’t feel quite honest for what was our experience today.”

One person who doesn’t mind this change: Volpe. “I had been married for 21 years before I came out,” he wrote in an email, “and I enjoyed a full and rich life with my wife and son.”

Volpe also wrote he hopes that “Rise” will show that theater is a place where teens who will never go on to Broadway careers can “test the waters of their creativity, take artistic risks.” Maybe other risks, too. As a New Yorker article recently noted, several leaders of the Never Again gun control movement are theater kids. And in May several of them are starring in a local production of “Spring Awakening.”

As Mazzu says in the second episode, “Our students need a place to express themselves, laugh, cry, exalt in joy, and most of all to dream, to dream big, to discover the greatness within them, because in my heart I do believe that every one of these kids has greatness inside them.” To create more of those places, Robert Greenblatt, chairman of NBC Entertainment and a former theater kid, helped establish RISE (Recognizing and Inspiring Student Expression) America, a program that will award $10,000 grants to 50 high school theater programs.

That’s meaningful to many of the show’s stars, like Radnor, a “pretty insecure high schooler,” who found confidence through school musicals like “Oklahoma!” and “Cabaret,” he said. “It gave me this forward momentum and this sense of purpose in the world that I didn’t probably have before,” he said, speaking on set in Mazzu’s earth-toned living room. For other roles, like the Civil War surgeon he played in PBS’ “Mercy Street,” he has done tremendous research, but not for this part. “I understood it in a bone-deep way,” he said. “I try to be on set with a certain amount of grace and a lot of gratitude for this role, it feels full circle for me.”

Perez, a former ward of the state, also credits her success to school arts programs and engaged teachers. As an adult, she helped to found Urban Arts Partnership, which works with underserved public schools to introduce arts-integrated curriculums. For her, “Rise” is real in all the right ways. She was in tears before she’d even finished the first script.

“My husband goes: ‘Oh my God. What’s wrong, what’s wrong?'” Perez recalled. “And I said: ‘I can’t believe I received this. I want to do this role. I’m already doing it every day. Except there’s not a camera on me.’ This is what I believe in.”