2026 Shuler Awards

Director Elizabeth Lenhart’s vision was clear from the first design meeting: the audience should walk in and feel like they’ve arrived at a concert, not a theater event. The opening had to land with stadium energy and only ease into traditional musical-theatre rhythm as the evening unfolded. The rig was built around that arc. Large ladders of Martin Mac Quantum washes lined the stage, fixtures positioned to read as visible architecture rather than hidden behind the proscenium. At the top of the show, the design ran cold and white, with tight beams cutting through the house and motion driving the energy. As the ceremony moved deeper into the awards and the student performance numbers, the palette softened into warmer theatrical territory. Color, intensity, and beam quality all shifted together to mark those transitions.

A second design problem ran underneath everything: the show plays to two audiences simultaneously, and both have to be served equally. The audience in the room at Cobb Energy expects a live event with full theatrical impact. The GPB broadcast audience watching later expects a polished television product. Every cue had to read cleanly through both lenses, which shaped fixture choice, angle, and intensity calibration from day one. Presented by ArtsBridge Foundation and Georgia Public Broadcasting, the Shuler Awards is an annual celebration of high school musical theatre in Georgia, broadcast on GPB after a live ceremony at the Cobb Energy Centre. Each year is built fresh from a pool of student-led performance numbers drawn from a dozen different productions, each with its own original creative team’s choices to honor while enhancing for the scale and audience of the awards show.