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Concord Theatricals has revealed the ten winners of the You’re in the Band: School of Rock – The Musical Contest. Ten schools have been selected to receive a free, three-performance license and all rental materials for their choice of School of Rock – The Musical or School of Rock: Young Actors Edition.
The selected programs, located across the United States and Canada, will present their productions of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s much-loved musical between August 2026 and December 2027.
In addition to providing particulars about their theatre program, applicants were asked: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s School of Rock – The Musical is a loving testimony to the transformative power of music. How has music affected your students and school community? The essays told touching and inspiring stories, from a school debuting their first production in15 years to a teacher returning to their alma mater to start a theatre program. Themes of resilience and dedication connected the winning essays, weaving stories that spoke to the power of the theatre. The winning school’s productions of School of Rock — The Musical will offer opportunities for hundreds of students to get involved with the arts, both on and offstage.
The selected schools represent nine US states and one Canadian province, serving students from elementary through high school.
The winning schools are: A.L. Brown High School (Kannapolis, NC), Deer Park Junior High (Deer Park, TX), Dwight Morrow High School (Englewood, NJ), Garden Grove High School (Garden Grove, CA), Greater New Bedford Regional Vocational Technical High School (New Bedford, MA), Hazelton Secondary School (Hazelton, British Columbia), Humphrey Middle School (Bolingbrook, IL), King High School (Tampa, FL), Kossuth High School (Corinth, Mississippi), Sumner-Fredericksburg School District (Fredericksburg, IA). For more information on the competition, visit concordtheatricals.com/sor-contest.
Based on the 2003 film of the same name, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s School of Rock – The Musical is a loving testimony to the power of music. With its sensational live kids’ rock band, the tuner follows Dewey Finn, a failed, wannabe rock star who decides to earn an extra bit of cash by posing as a substitute teacher at a prestigious prep school. There he turns a class of straight-A pupils into a guitar-shredding, bass-slapping, mind-blowing rock band. But can he get them to the Battle of the Bands without their parents and the school’s headmistress finding out?
Originally workshopped at New York’s Gramercy Theatre in the summer of 2015 before officially opening at Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre that December, School of Rock – The Musical marked the first time Lloyd Webber globally premiered a show on Broadway since Jesus Christ Superstar in 1971. The production picked up four Tony nominations, including Best Musical. The show made its West End debut at the New London Theatre on November 14, 2016, garnering the best reviews of the composer’s career. The tuner received three 2017 Olivier nominations including Best New Musical. In an unprecedented move, before the Broadway production even opened, Lloyd Webber granted North American schools and youth groups the opportunity to apply for the rights to perform the show. School of Rock: Young Actors Edition was adapted for young performers by iTheatrics and released for licensing in August 2025.
