Programs
Programs: the 5-week summer conservatory that quietly outperforms the 9-month track
Concentrated, immersive, expensive — and apparently the best predictor of young actors who actually stick with the work into college.
Now playing
Schools cut the drama program. Youth playhouses stepped in. Now what?
A decade of public-school theatre cuts handed the work to community youth playhouses. The model is working — but the bench of organizations that can actually do it is thinner than anyone wants to admit.
By Tessa Hadley ★ Section News ★ Dated May 10, 2026
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All articles → Performers
Performers: at fifteen, Ana Sandoval has already played a 38-year-old. The training shows.
A young actor coming out of the Miles Conservatory program describes a craft pedagogy that takes teenagers seriously as performers.
Schools
Schools: the unified-arts model that's reviving school theatre in three small districts
An off-the-shelf approach borrowed from inclusion programming is producing the strongest school-theatre revivals the field has seen in a decade.
Spaces
Spaces: Reed Park's quiet renovation is the model other public youth-arts buildings should be studying
A 1929 city-owned youth playhouse, $4.2M, four years of construction, and a finished result that doesn't look like a renovation. Here's why.
Departments
Five acts of the same play.
Act I
News
The field, the funding, the cycle — what's happening across youth performing arts.
Act IIPrograms
Conservatories, summer intensives, year-round training — what works and why.
Act IIIPerformers
The young actors. The teachers. The directors. The people in the rehearsal room.
Act IVSchools
School theatre — public, private, the unified-arts model, the post-cut revival.
Act VSpaces
The buildings. The renovations. The acoustics. The fly systems behind the work.
House note
For the people who plan to stay in the room.
Miles Memorial covers a field most newsrooms ignore. Youth playhouses do real work with real young actors, in real buildings, on real budgets. We treat the field the way we'd treat a regional theatre beat — with patience, with specificity, and with attention to the buildings as much as the performances.
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