Meet the 2024 Blumey Awards Best Actress and Best Actor Winners!

There’s a photo of Lainey Gaston, this year’s Best Actress winner at the Blumey Awards, right after she heard her name announced at the ceremony, celebrating the region’s top high school musical theater students. Mouth agape and eyes wide with surprise, she says it exactly captured her emotions in that moment.

“Oh my goodness… It was so shocking. I was not expecting to hear my name,” says the recent Concord Academy graduate.

Win or lose, she was simply happy and proud to have made it that far, and to share what she’d been working on with so many people, she says. Surrounded by other young people who shared her passion for performance, she knew she would be thrilled for whoever won the top prize.

What’s remarkable is you can spot these same sentiments of joy, enthusiasm and camaraderie — hallmarks of the Blumey Awards experience for many participants —  in the reactions of all the Best Actress nominees in that photo.

Those emotions register with Best Actor winner Rylan Lowe, too.

He says hearing his name announced during the ceremony was “heart-bursting.” He’d had a blast making new friends and rehearsing the whole week leading up to the Blumey Awards ceremony. Then getting to perform on a real “Broadway stage” was exhilarating.

“It's big for me,” says Lowe, a stand out baseball player, who recently graduated from A.L. Brown High School in Kannapolis, “because I've never done anything like this before.”

They are currently in New York for 11-days of workshops, auditions and rehearsals leading up to the National High School Musical Theater Awards, also known as the “Jimmy Awards.” This year’s event will take place on Monday, June 24 at Broadway’s Minskoff Theater and will be hosted by singer, songwriter, and screen and stage actor Josh Groban (“Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812,” “Sweeney Todd”). Groban is also a former host of the Tony Awards, Broadway’s most prestigious awards ceremony and the model for the Jimmy Awards.

You can tune into the Jimmy Awards and watch for free via live stream on Monday, June 24 at 7:30pm ET on Facebook and YouTube.

Here’s a closer look at this year’s Blumey Awards Best Actress and Best Actor winners, their unique journeys with musical theater, and their dreams for the future.

Learning to Believe in Herself

Lainey Gaston has always been a performer. Her first ensemble stage role was at age five for a summer camp production of Music Man, Jr. She loved the experience and continued theater for a long time as a fun side hobby. For years, her main focus was singing. She would frequently perform with school and church choirs.

She started to prioritize theater when she got to high school and realized her growing passion for it. She began considering musical theater as a possible career path. The warm welcome and support she received from her theater directors was key. “That's what really pushed me to believe in myself and strive,” she says.

“I've never really taken lessons or anything like that,” says Gaston, who shined on stage as the narrator in “Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat” during her school’s musical number at the Blumeys.

“I've just been doing this for a long time and I honestly … didn't even know that it was possible for me to win the Blumeys. And when I heard that, it was such a surreal moment and I just broke down in tears.”

She also received great support at home, including from her dad, a gifted musician as well as a teacher and principal at her school.

“He's just amazing at playing really any instrument, so he plays the piano and that's how I work on my songs and it doesn't cost me any money …. he's so willing to help me on everything and I just I love and appreciate him so much for that.”

To celebrate her high school graduation, Gaston went on a trip with her parents, two brothers and sister to New York City for the very first time. She loved (almost) everything about it.

“I was so excited. It's always been like my dream place to go just because of everything with Broadway and like the city and the lights and everything like that,” she says, “and it was absolutely amazing. The smell is awful, but I feel like that adds to the experience. I feel like it's like a little cherry on top.”

During rehearsals, leading up to the Jimmy Awards competition, she says she's looking forward to meeting new people and making new friends, as well as learning and networking with industry experts.

“It's such a great opportunity to make connections and to also figure out more things about myself and my vocal style and what songs work, what songs don't, things like that. I'm just really excited to learn more about myself.”

In the fall, she will head to UNC Greensboro, where she will work toward a BFA in Musical Theater. Her goal is to become a professional performer and knows that it could come in a lot of different forms.

“The dream is obviously Broadway,” she says, but also recognizes there are many other performance possibilities from regional theater and touring shows to film and TV and even Disney Cruises.

“I just want to experience as many things as I possibly can,” she says.

And if it doesn’t work out, she has also recently discovered a passion for teaching kids. Last year, she had the chance to help out in her school’s drama department as a teaching assistant, working with kids ranging in age from about 5 to 15.

“That really opened my eyes to a lot of different things,” she says. “… Like, kids don't start off as confident.”

That’s a feeling to which she could relate, after suffering from terrible stage fright when she was younger.  

“I was really scared in auditions, and I just didn't have any confidence at all. And I remember just feeling so helpless and just, like, broken… especially since performing was something that I was passionate about. I was just like, ‘Well, if I get nervous doing this, like, how am I supposed to continue to do this in the future?’”

She remembers how her parents and directors encouraged her, helped her to find her voice and build her confidence.

“I would love to share that with others,” Gaston says, “whether it's being a teacher or a voice teacher or just something. I would love to give back and to help those who might be experiencing [the] same things that I felt whenever I was younger.”

From Baseball to Broadway

Although Rylan Lowe remembers being mesmerized by the movie musical “Hairspray” when he was about four years old, most of his extracurricular focus growing up went toward competitive sports. He excelled in baseball, a sport he trained in for 12 years. He also competed on his high school’s varsity football team.

As an elementary school kid, Lowe had performed in musicals at his church and remembers having a lot of fun with the experience. He aged out of the available opportunities there, however, when he turned around 11 years old.

His middle school didn’t offer a theater program either so he threw himself into sports.

But sophomore year with the encouragement of one of his teachers, Lowe decided to audition for the spring musical. It was the first musical theater production at the school in four years.

“I didn't think I could sing when I was a sophomore,” says Lowe, who recently wowed Blumey audiences with his portrayal of Shakespeare from “Something Rotten!” during the Best Actor medley. “I didn't think I had that ability and he, like, kind of forced me to audition for the show.”

That turned out to be a fortuitous decision. Lowe was cast as the male lead, Daniel, in “Once on this Island,” and had a fantastic experience performing.

“I really enjoyed that show and, having that be, like, my first step into musical theater … kind of pushed me to want to pursue it in college.”

But it also caused a lot of angst because up until that point, Lowe had planned to play baseball in college and he felt really torn by the two different possibilities. He says it took him several months to navigate that “mental battle.” He ultimately decided to quit his high school baseball team senior year in order to focus on theater.

Even leading up to the Blumey Awards, he had some uncertainties about his future plans.

“I was still on the fence, like, ‘Do I really want to do this, …  am I making the right decision?’ And when they said my name, I instantly knew, ‘Okay, this is what I was meant to do. This is what God created me to do. I'm gonna go full on.”

Lowe says he’s looking forward to every aspect of the Jimmy Awards experience. “This is all new to me so I'm, like, kind of flabbergasted, I guess you can say, and overwhelmed with the thought of this even happening at all.”

From meeting new people from across the U.S., and working with Broadway professionals, to connecting with talent agents and casting directors, to participating in workshops on the campus of The Juilliard School, to preparing for auditions and the Jimmy Awards production numbers, it all sounds thrilling to Lowe.

He says this chance is “everything a theater kid has dreamed of.”

In the fall, he will head to Catawba College where he will enroll in the school’s Theater Performance BFA program. That wasn’t his initial plan. After auditioning and being called back at his first choice school, he didn’t end up getting admitted. When that happened, one of his musical directors submitted his audition tape for “Something Rotten!” to Catawba College. Representatives from the school urged him to formally apply and audition.

Not only was Lowe accepted, he was offered about $36,000 in scholarships and Pell grants.

“It is amazing,” he says. “My entire freshman year will be free.”

Lowe, who also spent nine months of his senior year training two-hours each morning to become certified as a firefighter, is very motivated and thoughtful in his approach to the future. He earned his certification as a backup plan, he says, in case theater doesn’t work out.

But even as he trained for his certification, something so different from the arts, he says, “I always kept theater at the forefront of my mind.”

For other students trying to figure out their path, he offers this advice:

“Whether it's baseball or musical theater or football or just singing, acting, whatever you want to do — do it full on and don't be as conflicted as I was,” he says.

“Venture out, explore what you like but also keep in mind what you really want to do and focus on that more than anything else.”