PHOTO | MAYRA PARRILLA GUERRERO

Corey Mitchell, a Tony-winning theater teacher at Northwest School of the Arts, turned to a different path upon retirement as founder of the Theater Gap Initiative.

A year into his retirement after his 25-year career at Northwest School of the Arts, Tony Award for Excellence in Theatre Education winner Corey Mitchell continues to spread diversity on the stage.

In 2021 Mitchell launched the Theater Gap Initiative to push minority youth interested in musical theater to bigger stages. The nonprofit college-prep program is for high school graduates with aspirations of pursuing a degree in fine arts. Mitchell founded the program in 2021 to prepare students for theater.

TGI works with college-admission and financial-aid counselors to help its cohorts reach their goals during a gap year after high school.

“The second part is the advocacy part of working with colleges and also truly working with high schools to make theater a welcomed space,” Mitchell said.

TGI works in collaboration with Central Piedmont Community College, giving students the opportunity to enroll in classes on campus.

The first cohort to participate in Mitchell’s initiative was 14 participants, but it ultimately shrank to six. There are now 11 students in the program.

“One of the goals that I had was to make sure I said I want to serve locally, but I also want to serve students that come from anywhere,” he said. “And amazingly, this year, we have students from Florida and Mississippi.”

TGI was founded on a problem Mitchell realized during the start of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020.

”When everything sort of shifted after George Floyd,” he said, “the thing that I found is that I was sitting on all of these people and began calling out industries and they started calling out theater.

“What do we do about our black problem? What do we do about our brown problem? And I went, ‘Well, one of the things is there isn’t a single major theater company in the entire state of North Carolina that is led by someone of a person of color, either as an executive director or artistic director.’

“What I was finding is that they're not getting to Broadway because they ain’t get into college. So, when you look at what that pipeline does, you've got to get more kids in to get more kids here, get more professionals here.”

Mitchell began to address the issue by mentoring and leading Black and brown youth into theatre through TGI, specifically assisting through a gap year, students through the process of college applications, prescreens and auditions.

Students interested in joining TGI must apply through their website at theatregap.org. Applications close on May 17.

Upon acceptance students will meet weekdays from 8 a.m.-2:30 p.m. for classroom, dance and theater instruction. They’ll attend the National Unified Auditions where they will audition for undergraduate programs.

Now with a constant busy schedule and a non-profit organization to fund, Mitchell has one goal.

“I want to franchise TGI and continue to inspire and get more Black and brown youth to participate in theater,” he said. “There’s no reason why there shouldn’t be a TGI Boston or TGI Houston. I would love to franchise and use this model in other places.

“The other thing is theater and musical theater aren't the only places that are lacking in diversity. If I'm looking at gap initiatives that happen for vocal music or opera, because there are actually Black kids that like classical music.”

Aside from his work at TGI, Mitchell has continued to direct and produce, most recently leading two casts in the production of “Annie,” which closed Oct. 23 at Children’s Theatre of Charlotte.

“It really is also important if I'm trying to shape young artists and encourage people to become artists, that I remain somewhat of a working artist myself,” said Mitchell.

Though not interested in directing the play at first, Mitchell approached the classic story of Annie with a twist, bringing a diverse cast and giving the play a realistic touch.

“At first, I was like, I don't want to direct that show, but then I took a step back and I actually was like, ‘I don't want to do Annie in the way that I've always seen it done,’” he said.

“My thoughts were from the perspective of a little black girl. The richest man in America taking her in and saying, ‘I want you to be my daughter’ doesn't feel real.”

Mitchell reframed the show as a comic book, while taking it out of the realistic world to where anything and anybody can exist. His mission was to create realistic life scenarios while catering it into the fantasy of a child.

“It's more real because it’s not real, if you will,” he said.

Mitchell has not only directed shows but was also once an actor and singer himself before starting his career in education in the mid 1990s.

“When I went to college — University of North Carolina at Wilmington — I said I wanted to become a theater teacher,” he said. “My school didn’t offer a degree in theater, so I kind of followed the model of my own high school theatre teacher, which was I got my degree in English, and I still worked a lot with the theater department.”

In 2001, Mitchell moved to Charlotte and taught theatre at Northwest for 20 years, where he accomplished several things, including directing the first high school production of “The Color Purple.” When asked if he missed teaching, his response was one of a true seasoned educator.

“I still teach,” he said. “In TGI we have a dozen teaching artists who come in and work with these young people and every so often I get to get in there and I mix it up with the kids too.

“It's like when you think about where your impact is, can you have a wide-ranging impact that maybe doesn't go particularly deep, but I have a select few kids that we can go really deep with the impact, and so it's still teaching.”

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