Super Summer Theatre flips for Miranda-scored ‘Bring It On’

Writer-composer-actor Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first Broadway musical — 2008’s semi-autobiographical “In the Heights” — won four Tony Awards, including one for best musical and another for Miranda’s score.

His third musical, the current Broadway sensation “Hamilton,” collected 11 Tonys, including two for Miranda (best score and best book).

The Miranda musical in between: “Bring It On.”

That’s exactly what Super Summer Theatre plans to do, starting Wednesday, when “Bring It On: The Musical” begins a 12-performance run at Spring Mountain Ranch State Park.

Inspired by the 2000 cheerleading comedy that spawned multiple straight-to-video sequels, the musical represents a Super Summer shot at a show designed to “attract a millennial audience” in the 18-25 age range, according to director Troy Heard, whose Table 8 Productions is staging “Bring It On.”

With its hip-hop-flavored musical routines — punctuated by explosive cheer moves from tumbling runs to back flips — the show “hits that (demographic) right in the middle,” Heard says before a recent rehearsal at Super Summer Studios.

Super Summer officials approved “Bring It On” for their 2016 season “early last year,” Heard recalls — before Miranda, and “Hamilton,” raised the musical, and its creator, to pop-culture prominence.

Unlike “In the Heights” and “Hamilton,” which Miranda described as “projects you generate,” the “Bring It On” musical “is an example of something that landed on my desk,” he told the blog remezcla.com. “I knew I was gonna learn from my collaborators.”

Collaborators, Heard points out, “who have pedigrees themselves.”

Joining Miranda on the score: composer Tom Kitt, who won a Tony for the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical “Next to Normal,” and lyricist Amanda Green, Tony nominated for “Hands on a Hard Body.” (Green no doubt picked up some pointers from her legendary father, Adolph, who with longtime collaborator Betty Comden wrote such classic musicals as “On the Town” and “Singin’ in the Rain.”)

And the writer behind “Bring It On’s” sassy script? Aptly named “Avenue Q” Tony winner Jeff Whitty.

But Heard credits the show’s music for “Bring It On’s” chief appeal.

“The show doesn’t stop,” he says. “Almost every number is so high-energy.”

The score represents “a mash-up of me and Tom Kitt,” Miranda told the Broadway.com website in 2011, on the eve of “Bring It On’s” Atlanta debut. “It’s a mash-up of pop, R&B and hip-hop. The show is designed to make teenagers’ heads explode.”

Miranda found musical inspiration in cheer competition soundtracks, as he explained to Wall Street Journal blogger Barbara Chai on the eve of “Bring It On’s” 2012 Broadway bow.

“Usually, it’s pop songs or R&B songs, but it’s sped up to like, crack level,” Miranda observed, “so what is the original song version of that?” The score’s range, from rap to ballad, “is just what these kids dance to; this is how they express themselves.”

In song, that is.

In dance, Super Summer Theatre’s “Bring It On” boasts choreography with a kick — and more, according to Jayme Haines-Server, a former Boulder City High School cheerleader who shares choreography duties with Alex Ferdinand-Harrison.

“We had a big challenge,” Haines-Server says of the show’s casting process, which called for 30 performers who “could not only act but sing, dance and cheer.”But “the audience isn’t going to know these people have never cheered,” she adds.

Not after “a couple of weeks of cheer camp” at Sunset Park, Heard points out. (“Luckily, it was still cool” at the time, he adds.)

As for “Bring It On’s” cinematic inspiration, Heard “saw the movie when it came out” 16 years ago and “thought I was going to hate it, but it was so charming and silly, it crosses all boundaries.”

Unlike many tales where “cheerleaders are usually the bad guys,” he adds, in this one “they’re the good guys.”

Some of them, anyway.

“Bring It On: The Musical” unfolds at contrasting schools: affluent, suburban Truman High and tough, multi-culti Jackson High.

The bridge between the two: teen queen Campbell (Katie Marie Jones), who realizes her dream of becoming Truman’s cheer captain, only to find herself rezoned and heading to a different high school for her senior year.

Naturally, that school is Jackson, where — OMG! — they don’t even have a cheer squad, which makes total sense at a school where the students sing “do your own thing.”

Instead, Jackson has a hip-hop dance crew headed by Danielle (Dominique Stewart), who teams up with Campbell to transform the aforementioned dance crew into a championship-caliber cheer squad heading for a showdown at nationals with none other than Truman High’s finest.

Just before the “Bring It On” rehearsal gets underway, director Heard revs up the cast members with this query: “You got your cheer shoes on? You got your cheer faces on?”

Two cast members back-flipping their way across the floor provide the answer.

Or, as the Jackson High kids sing in the first-act closer: “I’ll take first place and throw it in your face — gonna bring it on!”

Read more from Carol Cling at reviewjournal.com. Contact her at ccling@reviewjournal.com and follow @CarolSCling on Twitter.