For the record, South Mecklenburg High School's entry in the 2nd Annual Blumey Awards was their production of The Wiz. This will probably be news to most of the audience who packed Belk Theater to capacity for the Blumey ceremonies on Sunday night. Whenever an announcement of a South Meck nomination started booming over the PA system, the response from students, parents, and teachers from their section of the hall was so loud that the title of their show was invariably drowned out.

Other high schools from a seven county area - including Ardrey Kell, Central Academy of Technology and Arts, Charlotte Christian, Charlotte Latin, Covenant Day, Northwest School of the Arts, Providence, and South Point, who actually took home the trophies - didn't set off quite the same earthshaking volume levels when their nominees were announced. But they all came reasonably close, and the din set off when their winners were announced usually equaled the South Meck din.

Nor were these the loudest responses from the audience on a night that continuously crackled with electricity and excitement. The evening was framed with two mammoth teen ensembles, consisting of at least two representatives from each of the 32 high school musicals adjudicated in this year's Blumeys, singing and dancing together. Eight hefty production numbers were strewn between these extravaganzas, including excerpts from all six finalists for the Wells Fargo Best Musical award.

The last of these, an extract from Charlotte Latin's Les Miz, set off a lusty standing ovation, largely because of the exploits of Areon Mobasher, who would soon win the coveted Best Actor award for his portrayal of Jean Valjean. Before that announcement, Mobasher reappeared in a climactic medley with the five other Best Actor finalists, where his victory no longer appeared to be a slum dunk. The Best Actress field looked just as competitive when those finalists faced off, with Eva Noblezada prevailing for her role as Ariel in Northwest's Footloose.

It's a big deal for Mobasher and Noblezada, who will join 60 other Jimmy Award winners from 30 other award programs around the USA in a weeklong program of dream tutorials and rehearsals at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, culminating in a one-night special performance on Broadway at the Minskoff Theatre on July 1. You can bet they'll also do an encore as presenters at the 2014 Blumeys.

Neither Noblezada nor Mobasher were part of the Best Musical winner, though both their shows were nominees. In a mild upset, Charlotte Christian's Oklahoma! took the laurels. None of their Best Actor or Supporting Actor nominees took home an award, but Christian was the only school with nominees in all five acting categories, including Best Featured Actor. And with their Best Musical victory, they tied Central Academy of Technology and Arts for the most Blumeys in 2013 with four.

With tight choreography by Linda Booth, nicely varied lighting from John Hartness, and amazingly flexible musical direction from David Dabbon - with a Broadway caliber 17-piece band - the polish at Belk Theater was every bit as impressive as the high school pep. Without a doubt, Charlotte's got talent. The real question is: are you missing it?

You'd assume there's a wide, wide gulf between the infamous "Sieg heil!" and a relatively innocuous "Third Wave," but at Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, California, a young charismatic teacher named Ron Jones disturbingly narrowed the gap. All it took was for one of his students to ask how so many Germans could have denied Holocaust - and for Jones to design a demonstration that was shockingly successful even to him.

Jones has turned his chronicle of the 1967 experiment into a book, a play, and even a musical. While Children's Theatre of Charlotte's Advanced Performance Company productions are staged too late in the school year to qualify for award consideration - and too outside the aegis of CMS - the QC premiere at ImaginOn of Jones' The Third Wave was definitely a Blumey-calibre production in its May 9-11 run. Even if it was the play rather than the musical version. When Jones introduced the Third Wave salute, the enthusiasm with which his students picked it up was as chilling an evocation of the Third Reich as you could wish for.

The drama, co-written with playwright Joseph Robinette, had one of city's top adult actors, Mark Sutton, in the role of Mr. Jones, so realism of the presentation, from a casting standpoint, was certainly more compelling than say, high school productions of Oklahoma, Les Miserables, or Hairspray. Under Nicia Carla's direction, the 11 student actors weren't merely high school classmates. Groups of the girls doubled as parents of the students or a local pastor, while the three boys, quite diverse as students, united to form the Cubberley principal and, later in the action, a marauding father.

Among the young ladies, Emma Cooke was a standout as Alene, the aspiring writer who poses the fateful question to Mr. Jones, while Kristen Perry obviously relished the juicy role of the self-absorbed Eve. More of Jones's scrutiny was aimed at the boys, though, so Jason Chinuntdet had a wonderful chance to sketch a portrait of the renegade Bomber, who ultimately comes off quite well with his non-conformist attitude. Devastating in quite a different way was Christian Muller as the shy Norman, crestfallen when he has to return to normal life after volunteering to serve as his celebrity teacher's personal bodyguard.

Truth isn't always stranger than fiction. Nor does it always package the pedagogical wallop that a master dramatist can bring to true events when he or she uses them as an imaginative launch-pad for revelatory personal and philosophical explorations. So while there were no disappointments from the people who performed The Third Wave, I do wish the drama had stretched longer than 70 minutes. And deeper.