The TV documentary "Children Will Listen," which debuted on PBS Thanksgiving night, demonstrated the comeback of musical theater in schools. It used a Kennedy Center production of Stephen Sondheim's "Into the Woods" by Washington, D.C., kids as its anchor.

  Sondheim's fairy-tale-inspired show -- which ends with the song "Children Will Listen" -- was part of the Broadway Junior Collection of musicals represented by Music Theatre International, a New York-based theatrical licensor for which Freddie Gershon, co-chairman of performing rights organization SESAC, serves as chairman/CEO.

"Children will listen -- and I know that they do," says Gershon, who is also co-executive producer of the documentary. He cites an evaluation of New York public schools serving poverty-level neighborhoods that have participated in the Broadway Junior program, which he launched in 1998.

"Two schools did 'Guys and Dolls Junior' and one did 'Annie Junior,"' Gershon says. "We went back the following year to observe the children and interview parents, teachers and principals, and saw personal growth and maturing in a productive way. I'm not talking about turning a kid into Bernadette Peters or Nathan Lane or teaching them how to read music or a script better. But in 'Annie,' for instance, they learn about the stock market crash, the Depression, the New Deal, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- the things we take for granted when we see the show but that these kids are learning about for the first time."

LIFE LESSONS

These history lessons, Gershon adds, are delivered more effectively via theater than the traditional manner of the teacher lecturing in a classroom. Perhaps more significant, however, is the social instruction.

"They also learn how to get along with each other, self-confidence and discipline and social behavior," Gershon continues. "You can't put on a show if you're rowdy, and this is the first time in their lives where they're put in an event where they have to work with each other and share responsibility. In effect, what they're doing is creating a microcosm of society where they learn that everyone has different roles -- whether they walk onstage or work the lights or sound -- and hopefully we avoid things like Columbine, where someone feels isolated."

Created simultaneously is "a school community," Gershon adds, involving interaction with teachers and parents "who might not otherwise show up at school unless they were called in to hear their kid was bad."

But the Broadway Junior productions have an impact on the composers as well.

LIVING LEGACY

"I took Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock to see 'Fiddler on the Roof Junior' at a school in New York, with Tevye played by a Bangladeshi boy and his wife played by a Japanese-American girl, and the rest of the cast was mostly black and Latino kids," Gershon recalls. "When they sang 'Tradition,' the audience was in tears because it was made up of families who could identify through their own traditions -- and Harnick and Bock were crying because they never thought their legacy would live on like this.

"I brought Sondheim to the Kennedy Center rehearsal and he just started to cry: A lot of them were inner-city kids who reinvented the music to their own sensibility and hip-hop culture, and he loved it because he felt his legacy was being adapted by them -- and they were having a good time."

Sondheim appears in "Children Will Listen," as does Peters, who starred in the original 1987 Broadway production of "Into the Woods."

"(Sondheim) was so proud because he feels that teaching is the most wonderful thing you can do," Gershon notes. "He said that unless he had great teachers who mentored him, he couldn't have gone anywhere."