Editor’s note: This is the second installment of an ongoing series examining the impact and intersection of Georgia’s creative industries with conventions and conferences that select the state for their events. We were granted unique access to operational and financial data of the annual Junior Theater Festival held in Cobb County. Return to Georgia Entertainment regularly for updates. Read the first installment here.
By Carol Badaracco Padgett
Tim McDonald, New York-based Junior Theater Festivals (JTF) Worldwide founder and a musical theater director, producer, librettist and author, was in the seventh grade in a small Northern California town when he saw “The King and I” onstage at the local high school. Right away, he knew that theatre was his calling. So, he “rode a music scholarship (in opera) to college,” he says, and after graduation, he started a theater company with his friends.
Soon, McDonald realized that moving to New York would be necessary to set himself up for success running a theatre company. So, after eight years with the company he and his friends started, McDonald moved to the Big Apple and took a job with Music Theater International, a company that handles the licensing and copyright of musicals. Over time, he moved into a management role with the company’s Musicals Made Easy component, where he began adapting musicals for high school students to perform.
“I would sit across the table from all the greatest musical theatre writers in the world,” McDonald describes of his experience with Musicals Made Easy.“ And I would get to take their work apart, which no one was ever allowed to do; I was the first. And then I’d put it back together in an hour format … Arthur Laurents who wrote [the book]“West Side Story” … I did this with everyone. Who gets to see how the sausage is made?”
From there, McDonald founded Broadway Junior, an organization devoted to helping young theatre enthusiasts and the schools they attend to produce and perform Broadway musicals adapted specifically for young performers and their audiences.
“So, I had this concept, and I wanted to understand how Little League baseball and football [came to be such strong programs]in schools, why they’re in schools, and what was the history of it,” McDonald states.
He learned that sports infiltration of schools was a purposeful way of cultivating and preparing top youth talent to become the professional athletes of tomorrow. “You have to teach kids how to start, and competition is good for that,” McDonald notes. “Competition means that the field for what you’re doing gets stronger. So I studied the Little League World Series [concept]and how it started, and I thought, ‘What if we applied that to theatre?’”
JTF’s rise to multi-million-dollar enterprise
When McDonald applied the baseball and football training concept to educational theatre programs, theatre in schools took off.
“I pitched this idea to regional theatres – six different ones – and they all thought I was crazy, except for Theater of the Stars [a Georgia non-profit company once run by producer Christopher B. Manus that offered 60 seasons of theatrical programming],” McDonald says. “And he said, ‘I’m in. Let’s do it.’”
In 2003, the very first JTF event took place at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta. Two years later, McDonald met with Tom Schumacher at Disney Theatrical with an idea. “You’ve got all these titles, all these IPs, just sitting on the shelves,” he told Schumacher. “Let me turn them into musicals for schools.” And Schumacher said yes.
“So in 2005, we literally introduced the world to the Disney collection. We started with ‘Aladdin,’ and that was the magic key,” McDonald says.
By 2007, JTF had grown so popular with student musical theatre troupes from all over the world that the event moved to the Cobb Galleria Centre with its 144,000 square feet of exhibition space and 25,000-square-foot ballroom.
Big-picture takeaway
Today, the JTF event is broadcast live globally – far exceeding the 8,000+ theatre students, their families, and teachers who come from all around the world to the Cobb Galleria each year. By springtime 2025, the wintertime 2026 festival had already sold out with some 10,000 attendees.
“There is an entire world, a universe, that wants to be part of this,” McDonald says. “And so we live capture everything, and it’s broadcast all weekend long as a reality show, essentially. The show is a production set for a worldwide broadcast.”
In addition to drawing in more than 8,000 physical attendees as well as viewers from around the globe, JTF 2025 at Cobb Galleria employed more than 500 Georgia residents and contractors. Production spend for 2025 was $1.6 million according to an economic report from Atlanta-based In Concert Productions Inc., a long-time service provider for the event. Hotel nights, catering and transportation costs are not included in these figures.
In 2025 alone, JTF provided a $3.4-million boon to Georgia’s economy, according to the festival’s accounting team. “This year, for the very first time, we captured a brand new world premiere Disney musical, live on stage,” McDonald says. “It will be distributed in everything that Disney does. They’re talking about putting it on Prime, YouTube and, of course, Disney+.”
McDonald closes, “These young people who attend are going into the arts. They’re going into film and television, and for those who don’t, they are still going to have the skill set … of understanding how to communicate, how to collaborate, and how to create something with other people. Something that is greater than what you could ever create by yourself.”
And it all starts in Georgia.
