THE inaugural York Musical Theatre Company Stage Experience for 11 to 18 year olds is taking place at the John Cooper Studio Theatre @41 Monkgate, York.

Talented performers gathered last weekend to begin two weeks of tuition and workshops in singing, acting and dancing, leading to five performances of the teenage pop musical 13 – the only Broadway musical to have a cast made up entirely of teenagers – from August 29 to September 1.

Director and stalwart YMTC leading man Richard Bainbridge is in charge of the summer school, assisted by musical director John Atkin and choreographer Luke Redhead, who is new to York.

Audition workshops were held on March 18; the first music rehearsal for soloists followed on July 14 and now the summer workshops are in full swing for composer and lyricist Jason Robert Brown and book writers Dan Elish and Robert Hore's musical story of Evan Goldman, who is soon to turn 13.

His life promises possibilities aplenty, but then his parents divorce and Evan must move with his mom from the Big Apple, New York City, to "podunk" Appleton, Indiana.

Unless Evan can persuade his coolest classmates at the Dan Quayle High School to come to his bar mitzvah party, how will he survive the school year, let alone the rest of his life as he navigates a world of nerds, jocks and cheerleaders, first kisses and heartbreak?

Millthorpe School pupil Ed Atkin, 15, is playing Evan. "Although he's unhappy to be moving away from New York to this middle-of-nowhere town, he sees it as a chance for him to become one of the cool kids, unlike in New York, but if you're a geek, you're a geek wherever you are," he says. "So he befriends Archie, who's disabled, and Patrice, who's the school swot."

Half-English, half-French Mathilde Barker, 15, who attends All Saints School, takes on the role of Kendra. "She's one of the pupils already at the high school; she's very naive and quite popular: there are boys who have a crush on her but she doesn't realise!"

Director Bainbridge is delighted to be working on the 2007 American musical – the show that gave Ariana Grande her Broadway debut incidentally – as YMTC's first Stage Experience: "We were really keen to give young people the opportunity to learn some musical theatre skills over the summer and hopefully nurture some of them into future YMTC performers, and this is an ideal show" he says.

Such was the response at the auditions that "although the whole concept of this musical being called '13' is that originally there were 13 in the cast, playing children turning 13, we decided to double the cast size to 26."

Mathilde and Ed are enjoying developing their talents in a fortnight-long project. "I've previously done a Play In a Week show with director Matt Harper at the John Cooper Studio, and this summer's show is another big challenge but it's really exciting," says Mathilde. "It's good to be a part of this new company from the beginning."

"I've been working with York Light Youth since they started in 2013, doing every show with them, and I've also done two shows at school, Little Mermaid and The Wizard Of Oz, but this is my first lead role," says Ed. "As well as being the main character, I'm the show's narrator, which means I have to speak directly to the audience."

Ed has another lead part on the way. "I'm playing Joe, the main part, in Our House for York Light Youth at the Joseph Rowntree Theatre," he reveals of an autumn production in which Mathilde will be a principal dancer and will play a car salesperson too.

First, however, they are looking forward to performing 13, with its typically modern musical theatre hybrid of musical styles, from the Sixties pop of Being A Geek to the Barry White-echoing Hey Kendra, from the rock song Opportunity to the country hoedown All Hail The Brain.

"I like how inappropriately funny the show is for a musical about 13 year olds, with loads of politically incorrect jokes," says Ed. "I like how the show is made up of young characters, with no adults in the cast, and it's fun to be playing someone close to your own age, and for the cast to be playing roles like the Rabbis and Evan's mom," says Mathilde.

Richard agrees. "When someone said to me that their children would be keen to do 13, I went away and listened to the CD and loved it. What appealed to me was that there was a huge range of characters with different abilities, and a story the cast could relate to, and I just loved the music, which is so varied and very catchy," he says.

"If children are going to come to workshops for two weeks, they need to enjoy it as a summer-holiday experience and they're definitely enjoying doing 13. Taking this project forward, if we do it again next year, we'll again have to do something they want to do as these are the people who will keep York Musical Theatre Company going."

Tickets for 13, The Musical's 7.30pm evening shows and 2.30pm Saturday matinee are on sale at thelittleboxoffice.com/ymtc.

Charles Hutchinson