CCV Winooski hosts screening of ‘Listen Up,’ a modern musical on Vermont teens

The cast of “Listen Up”. Photo courtesy of Bess O’Brien.

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.

A CCV employee prepares popcorn for an attendee. Photo courtesy of Marianne DiMascio.

“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 featured 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 push on for these causes, even when “the world is on fire.”

After the film ended, Vermont Public’s Director of Content Partnership Eric Ford interviewed “Listen Up” producer Bess O’Brien and two actors, Avery Cutroni and Don Kiputa. “There’s so much depth and insight baked into this,” Ford told them.

The panelists talked about how it was tough to share the deepest parts of their lives with an audience via the creative process.

“It was quite hard, but if you want something to be successful, you have to push yourself,” said Kiputa, one of the actors who is a person of color. Cutroni echoed Kiputa, saying, “The more we worked on it, the better it got.

” Community College of Vermont Regional Director Marianne DiMascio was thrilled with how all the groups came together to put on this show for the Winooski community.

“In Vermont, we work that way,” DiMascio said.