A spoken word and musical show exploring the messy realities of Vermont teens and the causes they care about has swept the state in the last two years. And last week folks in Winooski got to see it themselves.
Community College of Vermont in Winooski screened a recording of the show, “Listen Up,” as performed last summer live at Shelburne Farms. The Sept. 29 event was put on with the help of Vermont Public, the Winooski Partnership for Prevention and Kingdom County Productions.
The musical, written and acted by Vermont teenagers, was performed across Vermont last year, and now Kingdom County Productions is running screenings of the film version of the play.
The show is about 90 minutes long and moves through themes of depression, anxiety, LGBTQ+ relationships, social media, COVID-19, immigration, gun violence in schools, racism in Vermont and more.
“We’ll unpack all of the boxes,” one of the cast members said in the show’s introduction sequence, explaining that the performance would be emotionally intense and vulnerable.
The second-to-last segment of the show features only the cast’s nonwhite actors, who spoke about their experiences in a majority-white state and encouraged the majority-white audience at Shelburne Farms and viewers at large to “listen up” to their words.
For the final segment and curtain call, the full cast returned to sing about how the show wasn’t the end of their work and that they will continue to push for their causes.
