After 65 years, the McGaw YMCA will close the curtain on its annual production “Brillianteen,” produced and performed by Evanston Township High School students.

Sue Sowle, McGaw’s senior director of youth initiatives and enrichment, said five years ago, the YMCA began to closely analyze its outreach programs to ensure services aligned with the mission of the organization — supporting development, healthy living and social responsibility among Evanston youth with special attention to underserved communities in the city. Some programs were cut, but Brillianteen remained despite what Sowle outlined as three major problems: a lack of diversity, diminished student leadership opportunities and underage drinking associated with the program.

YMCA staff reworked their recruiting tactics and made some changes to the culture of the program, but Sowle said after five years, the changes have not been significant enough to justify Brillianteen’s continuation.

“At the end of this, the program still doesn’t align well enough with the mission, who we are and who we want to be,” she said. “We’ve got limited dollars and we want the dollars to go where we know it’s going to have the most impact.”

Brillianteen was created in 1952 by Bill Harper, an Evanston resident who wanted to initiate a theater program for youth in the city. Beginning with just 25 performers, the program swelled to include upwards of 250 cast and crew members, who work for several months to direct, design and perform a full-length musical.

YMCA organizers awarded scholarships to two Brillianteen participants who had demonstrated outstanding leadership at the end of each performance, Sowle said. Although the program is ending, McGaw YMCA has established a new scholarship commemorating Brillianteen, which will be awarded to two ETHS seniors interested in the arts each year.

This year, just over 100 ETHS juniors and seniors, along with volunteers from the community and the YMCA, have been working since December to organize the final Brillianteen show, the 65th Anniversary Brillianteen Revue, which will run from March 4-6. Participants rehearse four days a week, twice on weeknights and on Saturdays and Sundays.

Brillianteen coordinator Kelsey Kovacevich said she and the students felt a revue of select songs and dance numbers from the Brillianteen archive would be the most appropriate farewell to the program.

“Basically what that means is we’re doing 24 songs from 17 different Brillianteen shows,” she said. “We think we’ve got a really nice representation of the program over the years.”

Kovacevich said several alumni, some of whom went on to have careers in the arts, were also returning to participate in the final Brillianteen performance.

Katie Tucker Trippi, director of alumni and development at the McGaw YMCA, grew up in Evanston and worked on crew for Brillianteen’s 1975-77 shows beginning in her sophomore year of high school.

“I was very much actively involved in all kinds of things (at the YMCA), but Brillianteen attracted kids across the scope … that had never been involved in musical theatre at the high school,” Trippi said. “It was a great introduction to being on stage and learning how to be a leader.”

The theatre program at ETHS is extremely competitive, Kovacevich said, and Brillianteen, a no-cut program, offered an opportunity for students who could not get involved in theatre at school to explore it elsewhere.

“We get the kids who otherwise wouldn’t be able to be involved in a play or a musical if they were only participating in things at the high school, so we’re fortunate to provide that opportunity to these students,” Kovacevich said.

When considering the future of Brillianteen, Sowle said one of the major problems was that volunteers could become too hands-on in the production process. She said in the past five years, YMCA organizers urged the volunteers to let students assume full leadership of the program, a change which has mostly taken effect.

However, Sowle said efforts to diversify the program through recruiting participants from all backgrounds and featuring a wide range of plays had not been as successful as organizers hoped.

“Even with all that, it still doesn’t look like Evanston,” she said. “So that was one of the factors in our decision to end this program.”

Sowle also said there had been a “long association of kids in Brillianteen and underage teen drinking.” YMCA staff had made a point to discuss individually with each participant expectations of the program, an effort which Sowle said helped, but didn’t curb the behavior to the extent they had hoped it would.

“We know that there are fewer parties and we know that kids don’t drink more during the Brillianteen season, which was happening,” she said. “But again, we didn’t move far enough.”

Trippi said she felt the program’s struggles with diversity were more critical to its downfall than underage drinking, which she said happens irrespective of Brillianteen’s existence.

“I don’t think it has as much to do with Brillianteen as it has to do with teenagers in Evanston … but it definitely was part of the decision around (ending) Brillianteen,” Trippi said. “Mostly I think the Brillianteen decision had to do more with the kids that it was serving. The participation had dwindled in recent years and … even though the staff at the (YMCA) had focused the program to serve more diversity … that wasn’t happening.”

Brillianteen’s impact on Evanston youth has been signficant throughout its run, Sowle said. She said the program would be missed by both YMCA staff and the community at large.

“For 80 of them, this is kind of a nice thing in their life and it’s not that important,” Sowle said. “For 20 of them, it’s huge and you get to see these kids who maybe have never had a leadership role. … You see them grow over the course of this relatively short thing. It’s transformative.”

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