The views expressed in this piece are reflective of the author only and not of HomeRoom Show Choir.
Wheaton Warrenville South's "The Classics" continue to hold serve as one of Illinois' best groups. Photo: Nathan Ensley / @nensley.photography
I usually don’t concern myself with matters in the Land of Lincoln.
As a born-and-bred Wisconsinite, I was taught growing up to hate all things Illinois – the tolls, the Bears, and how it was just the ‘in between’ on family trips from Wisconsin to St. Louis.
But now, as the editor-in-chief of this nationwide show choir content collective, I have to care about Illinois.
And at least on the show choir side, what I’m seeing is a state with an identity crisis.
Let’s start with the positives. While Chicago and the state as a whole were hit hard by the pandemic, there are still plenty of signs of life in the circuit. Illinois still has more than its share of national contenders – Wheaton Warrenville South, Mt. Zion, and Wheaton North among them. Competitions like the WWS Choral Classic and the MTZ Midwest Invitational remain calendar highlights for plenty out-of-state groups who want to test their mettle against Illinois’ best. Further down the state and the list of groups, a robust east-central scene has multiple handfuls of small mixed groups that provide great storylines throughout the season.
Regrettably, all those positives are a shell of what they once were.
This past winter and spring brought the first show choir season without a group named Elite Energy from Decatur on the stage in seemingly forever – at least 35 years by some estimates. It’s a topic that still stirs up strong feelings in the community, with a little glimmer brought back earlier this summer.
Along Interstate 57 north of Champaign, Paxton-Buckley-Loda shelved its program in advance of the 2023 season. Farther towards the Indiana state line, Hoopeston also ended its show choir adventure before 2023.
The far western scene has been decimated during the past decade as well. O’Fallon, the poster program for schools in the eastern metro of St. Louis, stopped hosting its invitational in the late 2010s. By 2020, a two-choir program was gone. Belleville East was done after 2013, Althoff Catholic in Belleville after 2017, and a short experiment at Collinsville in the late 2010s didn’t find any footing. The lone survivor from the St. Louis area is Highland, who competed at Manteno and Quincy in small mixed this year.
More seasoned show choir observers will remember the messy exodus from show choir that Township District 214 had in the northern suburbs of Chicago. The highly contentious and very public decision by director Debora Utley to shut down the Buffalo Grove Expressions and explore vocal jazz came at the end of 2017. Expressions was an elite group and four-time Show Choir Nationals champion. Its abandonment sent shockwaves through the national show choir community. Wheeling, a winning program in its own right, ceased to exist following the 2018 season. Rolling Meadows, which had its heyday decades ago, brought show choir back for 2019 and was making progress by the end of 2020. The pandemic killed that. Prospect made an intentional pivot to acapella during the pandemic. John Hersey now stands as the last bastion of show choir within District 214.
The massacre of the suburban Chicago show choirs didn’t stop there. St. Viator, a Catholic high school within 214’s boundaries, was a growing program that was wiped out by the pandemic. The same goes for Fremd, located in neighboring District 211. Wauconda had six years of experience leading up to the pandemic and didn’t survive.
It would be alright if there was some growth in the scene to compensate for all of these groups leaving. The fact is that it’s just not there. There are about a dozen groups generally considered ‘varsity’, ‘championship’, or ‘large mixed’ (depending on the division names at each competition). Take the roughly 20 groups competing in small mixed and Mother MacAuley, a girls school that pops out once or twice a year, and you’re around 30 schools in Illinois that currently maintain a show choir presence. The newest of these is Kankakee, who rejoined the scene in 2019 after decades away.
Illinois’ competition scene also finds itself in quite the weird spot for 2025. Twelve competitions spread across seven weekends will welcome groups this next competition season. Mt. Zion moves back from its long-held January slot to March, ceding the title of earliest competition to Crete-Monee on February 8. Multiple competitions then run pretty much every weekend to the middle of March. In a continuation from 2024, neither Danville nor Sullivan will host a competition, leaving two Illinois contest staples off the list. Watseka, which lasted hosted in 2023, does not appear to be hosting in 2025 either.
Ten years ago, there were 16 competitions in the Land of Lincoln – three in January, six in February and eight in March. However, there has been some exchange in the competition category. Naperville North and Peotone have both debuted competitions in the past decade, with Peotone’s inaugural event occurring just this past season.
The competition situation is exacerbated by the fact that groups from Illinois tend to have rather erratic competition schedules. Forgive Mt. Zion and Wheaton Warrenville South, as they’re good enough to justify a national-type competition schedule. Mundelein, a solid mid-tier large group, hasn’t seen a stage in Illinois since before the pandemic. Naperville North’s only in-state competition in 2024 was a late addition at Quincy. In 2025, Glenwood will not see an Illinois stage until they host on March 1, although that is followed up by appearances at Mt. Zion and Wheaton Warrenville South.
The Illinois show choir scene now arrives at the confluence of all the factors outlined above in advance of the 2025 season.
What will things look like from here on out?
As experienced in 2024, new powers will step up in each division as the power balance reshuffles. El Paso-Gridley spent a week at #1 in the HomeRoom Illinois rankings this past season, and Manteno took its first win in several years. Programs like Glenwood and Waubonsie Valley are, right now, not the multiple-wins-a-year giants that they were several years ago. That’s okay! There are only so many wins to go around. Sullivan and Danville recently made strategic moves down to small mixed and found plenty of success, ending the season first and second in HRSC’s Illinois festival rankings. Should both elect to stay in festival, another year of those two groups running the table seems to be in store.
The condensed competition season and smaller number of competitions available in-state will lead to somewhat tougher battles on a week-to-week basis, unless more of the state’s groups choose to eschew the heartland for opportunities elsewhere. Finals spots, especially if they’re open to single-gender groups, will be hard to come by at several competitions.
Looking beyond the immediate impacts and zooming in more on the long-term revitalization of show choir in Illinois is quite the interesting task. It is the job of no one single person to ‘grow show choir in the state of Illinois,’ yet most performers, professionals and observers would likely agree that a larger scene is, in most ways, a better one.
A show choir belt that hasn’t been mentioned yet is the southeastern Chicago suburbs. While a smaller belt, this one is a very interesting case study in the post-pandemic era when looking for future growth. Alan B. Shepard Nova from Palos Heights made a string of finals appearances seemingly out of nowhere in 2023. However, after the departure of director Roland Hatcher, the group only competed three times in 2024 and dropped into the depths of the festival mixed division. While it’s been a bumpy road, Crete-Monee has made a finals appearance each of the past two years and is now making occasional appearances in large mixed. Dwight D. Eisenhower in Blue Island took the year off in 2023 but came back for a strong 2024, making multiple finals rounds. For being just across the metro from the northern exodus, these schools arguably all came back from the pandemic stronger, proving that the pandemic can’t really be a catch-all.
Is access the issue? The Decatur Show Choir Complex effectively ceased operations before the 2024 season. Peoria Area Performing Arts Studio, serving a metro population of 400,000, placed a relatively small group on stage this past season. The community group model would need a lot of work to get off the ground and would likely take years to build traction in other metros like Bloomington, the Quad Cities or Champaign-Urbana, especially without school district support in an era of transient inflation.
Would a new wave of passionate directors fuel a resurgence? A handful of current programs like Naperville North, Batavia, and Unity got off the ground just over a decade ago. Those who watched the hit show Glee in their preteen years are now in late college or a few years into their professional careers. Starting a show choir program from scratch is a daunting task for a young director, but with little movement at many of the state’s more established programs and some space after the pandemic, a few new programs spurred by passionate younger directors may be in the future. Good music education programs at colleges such as Millikin, Elmhurst and Illinois State allow for potential new directors to stay in-state during their college years as well.
Is it simply an issue of perception? As an outsider, I don’t know. Perhaps there’s a stigma around show choir in the state. Only time and positive examples will change that.
What I do know is that I would like to see Illinois emerge from this crossroads stronger than it is right now. Whether that be better shows across the board, more true throwdowns of several in-state groups, more competitions, more groups, or some other tangible effect, it will only do Illinois good to find its identity.
Comments