For Yellow Springs Middle and High School performers, this spring’s musical is not exactly a musical — and that, perhaps, is part of its charm.

“Fearless Then, Fearless Now,” set for 7 p.m. Thursday–Saturday, March 12–14, and 3 p.m. Sunday, March 15, in Westminster Hall at First Presbyterian Church, is a revue: a theatrical collage of songs linked by a shared spirit. In this case, that spirit is memory — specifically, the long, beloved history of Yellow Springs school musicals, with numbers drawn from spring productions past and stitched together into something new.

This story is keeping the titles and songs included in the revue tucked politely behind the curtain — even if an announcement in last week’s issue of the News may already have spoiled part of the fun. Nevertheless, in speaking with the News ahead of a rehearsal this week, director Lorrie Sparrow-Knapp said she’d still rather keep mum until opening night.

“I would like people to come and be surprised,” she said.

The show grew into its current format partly out of necessity. As has been the case since the onset of the facilities upgrade project, district rehearsal and performance spaces are in flux, and with six weeks to put together a show following the winter production of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” the time felt ripe for a different type of show, eschewing elaborate sets and costumes for a focus on voice and movement.

“When we thought about spaces, when we thought about time constraints, I kind of made a decision really early on … that we weren’t going to buy or build,” Sparrow-Knapp said. “We have so much; it’s time to use what we have.”

A big part of what they have is a long theatrical lineage — which, as attested by the revue’s title, “Fearless Then, Fearless Now,” the show aims to celebrate, grounding itself in the present by looking backward. Past News reporting illuminates an established history of spring, and sometimes fall, musicals going back nearly six decades, in what has ultimately become an annual tradition, with some favorites such as “Oklahoma!”, “The Music Man” and “The Sound of Music” gracing the stage more than once. Sparrow-Knapp said the town’s affection for that tradition forms the bedrock of this year’s show.

“I mean, this town loves musicals,” she said. “This is a very different, intimate piece of theater, and I think people are going to love it.”

Aside from its format, the show is also different from most spring productions in that students had a larger-than-usual hand in shaping it. Sparrow-Knapp said much of the movement in the show was choreographed by student Maggie Bullock, and the lion’s share of the script was penned by student Antoinette Siegel-Hall, who is also part of the cast. Originally, Sparrow-Knapp had floated the idea of having an improv class work on the script together, but Siegel-Hall started drafting on her own, giving shape to a series of beats outlined by Sparrow-Knapp.

“[Siegel-Hall is] an outstanding theater writer; she really can picture what needs to be there, she has a really good command of dialogue, and she’s just got this natural ability to tell good stories,” Sparrow-Knapp said.

For her part, Siegel-Hall said she aimed to transform what might have been a sequence of songs into something with characters and a dramatic-comedic spine.

“I felt like it wasn’t a real musical without a story,” she said. “So I wanted to create characters and then something to interact with the music to make it a little bit more of a story, and still acknowledge our past, and still acknowledge the talent we have.”

The script’s characters manifest in a series of narrators, each of whom bring different personalities to the stage, according to their actors.

“Mine is kind of outgoing, and in the script, it said they were more ‘masculine leaning,’” narrator Helen Lowry said. “I’m just trying to be myself, because I’m usually more masculine leaning and outgoing.”

“My character loves everything to do with love and relationships,” narrator Pearl Bachman said.

“And mine is kind of the more serious one — as serious as this show is, which is not very,” narrator Eliza Vosler said.

Siegel-Hall also helped put together another moving — in more than one sense — element of the show: a slideshow of projected images from past years of Yellow Springs productions. The photos, gathered from school and newspaper archives as well as community members, reach back decades.

“If you are a past thespian at Yellow Springs High School, you can see a projection in the back of the show that features pictures from shows way back to ’81,” Siegel-Hall said.

That backward glance, cast member James White said, gives the production a wistful undercurrent. As a senior, this will be White’s last spring show before graduation — and, in all likelihood, the last before the district moves into its new rehearsal and performance space next school year.

“Seeing old classmates do the same songs that we’re doing and looking back at old memories, especially as a senior, graduating this year, is even more emotional,” White said. “So it’s gonna definitely be some tears closing night.”

Even so, Sparrow-Knapp said, the mood in rehearsal has been “fast, furious and so much fun.” That may be, she said, because the stripped-down format has left more room for collaboration, with an increased focus on “the connection between crew and cast.” The script for the revue includes a recognition of the tech crew — often unnoticed backstage — in the form of a stylized sequence in which crew members become part of the action rather than disappearing behind it.

“We essentially have no set for the majority of the show, so the most challenging thing is the tech ballet,” said tech crew member Ace Sadowski. “At that point, we bring in our tech stuff and move it around to kind of [dramatize] what a normal tech day looks like.”

“And it’s not just moving set pieces,” added tech crew member Ram Dobson. “It’s other occasional fun things — like I’m currently tearing a pair of pants in half to make a pair of tearaway pants.”

That kind of good-humored ingenuity seems to define the production, with students taking on writing, choreography, acting, singing, dancing and stagecraft on a compressed schedule and with a lot of flexibility. Sparrow-Knapp said that once Siegel-Hall finished the script, the crew of narrators — all middle school students, some new to acting — stepped up to fill in and learn their parts within a week. At the same time, even if students are theater mainstays and were already familiar with a particular song and its context within its parent work, they had to learn to see each song with new eyes.

“There’s no other distraction except the individual in the song,” Sparrow-Knapp said. “And because these songs are not linked to a play in progress, we have some ability, in a true revue style, to interpret.”

For student performer Lucia Espinosa, that has meant reframing a song she first performed in last year’s production of “The Music Man.”

“In the original one, it has this certain feel to it, but then for this musical, I have a different reason I’m singing it, and so I have to sing it in a different way,” she said, adding that the experience taught her to “be flexible and able to adapt.”

Ultimately, Sparrow-Knapp said, that flexibility is what makes a revue like this feel especially right for this year. Students have used what is at hand — a church hall, a stack of old photos, a handful of microphones and a lot of gumption — to carry old songs across time and make them fresh and novel again.

“I really hope everybody comes to see,” Sparrow-Knapp said. “It is a performance that I think people won’t want to miss, and I don’t think there will be a dry eye in the house.”

Tickets for “Fearless Then, Fearless Now: A Revue” are $15 for general admission, $10 for seniors and $5 for students, and will be available at the door half an hour before each performance. Tickets are also available in advance online at cur8.com/15352/project/137507, with additional fees charged.

To see a YS News compilation of photos from some past spring musicals, go to http://www.bit.ly/YSMusicals74to99