Director of Florida State Thespians stepping down

For 16 years, Michael Higgins has presided over what has grown into the largest high school theater festival in the world. About 7,000 students are attending Florida State Thespians, which opened Wednesday and continues through Saturday in Tampa.

"It runs the gamut from very small private schools with four or five kids in a drama club to an arts magnet school that has 300 theater majors,'' said Higgins, state director of the festival and a theater teacher at Douglas Anderson School of the Arts in Jacksonville.

Every spring, the thespians take over downtown for a few days. The Straz Center for the Performing Arts is the main venue, but activity also goes on at the Tampa Convention Center, Tampa Theatre and hotels.

More than a few Broadway and Hollywood stars have cut their theatrical teeth at Thespians. Alumni include Ashley Brown, who had the title role in the musical Mary Poppins, and Michael Lynche, a finalist on American Idol.

The festival was the subject of an acclaimed documentary, Warren Skeel's Thespians, screened at the Gasparilla Film Festival.

Schools bring elaborate shows to the festival and compete for awards. The mainstage lineup this year includes Sweeney Todd, Sweet Charity, Alice in Wonderland, Death of a Salesman and Awesome '80s Prom.

Higgins, 51, is stepping down as director after this year's festival, to be succeeded by Lee Tempest, a teacher at Deerfield Beach High School. Here's an excerpt of an interview with Higgins.

What's your favorite part of Thespians?

I enjoy most the empowerment of students to be able to run this by themselves. Everybody looks at me and wonders how I must be so tired or so overworked, but I have this to a place now where I delegate almost everything to students. Unlike any other thespian conference in the country, this is entirely student managed.

Have you seen changes in students through the years?

What's striking to me is that at the beginning, it was a rather celebrity-driven event in which the kids were wanting to be stars. Nowadays, there's more interest in being employed.

Do particular productions stick in your mind?

One I remember well was when a school in South Florida brought a production of Patient A, a play about Kimberly Bergalis, an AIDS patient in Florida who had notoriety because she contracted HIV from her dentist. It was significant because her parents attended this performance being done about the death of their daughter. So I found that to be a particularly moving event.

Why did you decide to step down as state director?

I think this is an ideal time for new leadership. How the festival is going to handle its numbers is going to require a revolution. I was part of the revolution when we went from typewriters to the Internet; the new director will be part of the next revolution.

What is it about theater students that makes them different from other students in high school?

I think it is maturity in facing their own feelings. Whether they're good or bad as actors, they're being put in situations where they've got to confront their feelings, give their feelings names and manipulate their feelings. I think that gives them an openness and a maturity that doesn't come easily in high school where the status quo is really to hide your feelings and to mask who you are to try to fit in and belong.

John Fleming can be reached at fleming@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8716. He blogs on Critics Circle at blogs.tampabay.com/arts.