FAIRHOPE – Sydney Gray recently graduated from Fairhope High School as the winner of a national musical theater songwriting competition for the second year in a row.

Gray won a spot among the national winners in the National Alliance of Music Theaters and the National Endowment for the Arts' 2025 Musical Theater Songwriting Challenge for high schoolers. Both the 2024 and 2025 winning songs are from "Anavaly," Gray's third original musical.

She started working on this show in the summer of 2022. Before that she wrote a jukebox musical based on the "Hawaii Part II" album. Her first musical was written during COVID-19 when Gray was in seventh grade.

"I was stuck at home doing pretty much nothing," she said, "so I was just like, 'Yeah, I'll write a full musical. Why not?'"

Gray said this first show was inspired by "The Lightning Thief" musical, which is about the first book in Rick Riordan's "Percy Jackson" series.

Gray first started working on her third musical while on a trip to New York for the Broadway Artists Alliance Camp.

After seeing a Broadway show — which Gray couldn't remember if it was "Funny Girl," "Six" or "Hadestown" — she was inspired to write something in her notes that later became the bridge to last year's winning song, "Little Miss Heard but Not Seen." This was the first full song she wrote for "Anavaly."

While talking to other students in her piano class at Fairhope high, Gray was inspired to write her third "Anavaly" song, titled "Fall," which won the competition this year.

According to a press release on Gray's win, "Fall" is a romantic ballad where the character Carlos shares his feelings for Nava Lee, but he's unsure of how to convey his emotions.

"Honestly, I think 'Fall' is probably the best moment (in 'Anavaly'), just because it's that turning point of like 'Oh my gosh, they're more than friends,'" Gray said with a giddy laugh.

"Anavaly" is centered around a typical post-COVID-19-era high school and focuses on eight main characters, each one telling a different story, while mostly focusing on teen mental health.

The musical originally only focused on the title character, Nava Lee, and her mental health journey. After some interactions with friends and even the other winners of last year's competition, Gray began to focus on the stories of more of the characters to create "as much of a full picture as I can."

"Focusing on one character kind of adds to the stereotype that 'Oh, it's just this few minority that struggle with it, it's just these few people that struggle with this,' when, in reality, everybody has their own struggles," Gray said, "and it doesn't have to just be mental illness. It can also be a disability, it can also be completely situational, it could be trauma-based, it could be being LGBTQ, like there's so many different instances that can impact the mental health of an individual. Especially in high school and especially in America."

Gray handles the heavy topics in the show by "leading the audience in comfortably" or by making some details "not so on the nose." She also said she "copes through a lot of comedy," which has directed her approach in writing.

Working on "Anavaly" presented challenges "every day" for Gray. With "so much representation," she said she strives to "make sure that it's all right" before writing. This creates a lot of research for herself. Despite this, one of her biggest challenges is getting started.

"Writer's block is fun, and by fun, I mean not," she said. "It's like you have all the things you want to write but then trying to figure out how to say them; it's so difficult. It's so difficult sometimes to convey what you want to say, and that's why it takes years to write a show. … The hardest thing about writing is the writing."

To deal with the creative block, Gray calls her friends, who have supported and helped her throughout the show's creation. Sometimes she gets help on ideas and other times her friends help her to "take a structured break" and play video games or "just chill."

RUTH MAYO / GULF COAST MEDIA

Gray started writing songs and "writing in general" as soon as she was old enough to "put together sentences." She often wrote poems, and by sixth grade she had written a full novel. She's been playing the piano for 13 years and played the trombone in the high school band. She also plays the ukulele and occasionally the guitar.

Some of Gray's favorite musicals, "right now, because they do change," are "Falsettos," "Cabaret" and "Hadestown." She also gave "honorable mentions" to "Hamilton" and "The Lightning Thief."

She said if she had to choose one actor or musical theater writer to look up to, she would choose Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote and originally starred in "Hamilton" and has created other musicals and songs for movies.

"My motto, which I say so much it's lost meaning at this point, but I want to try and be the next Lin-Manuel Miranda," Gray said, "just because he's the type of person that he writes his own stuff, he orchestrates his own stuff, but then he goes and he is the main musical lead. I want to be kind of like the next him. He's somebody that I took a lot of inspiration from."

NEXT STEPS FOR SYDNEY GRAY

Over the next month, Gray will partner with an orchestrator, an arranger, her mentor and the people who were cast to perform her song so she can finalize "Fall." In June, she will join the other 2025 competition winners to perform their songs in a concert on Broadway. Sheet music for the winning songs will be published by Concord Theatricals afterward, she said.

With a "bit of a journey still to go," Gray said she hopes "Anavaly" will one day "make it to the stage" after she works on it during or after college.

"We need this type of representation [for mental health]," she said. "We need it to be, not normalized in the way of pushing it away, but normalized in the way of, yes, people deal with this, and it is something that needs to be noticed and doesn't need to be shunned or shamed."

For college, Gray plans to attend school in Liverpool, where she will study in their musicianship program for its inaugural year. Gray said she is the second person from Alabama going to the college this year.

She said she always thought studying abroad would be "kind of cool" and that she is excited about going to the United Kingdom. She mentioned how she is most excited for the potential to earn connections to the West End, like what she has on Broadway through the songwriting competitions.

"I think, most of all, it will open me up to all new experiences than what I've had here in — not just Alabama but — in America," Gray said. "And I feel like it'll open me up to so much more of the world."

Gray shared how she didn't necessarily feel confident in pursuing musical theater until she decided "it's OK for me to want to do that."

"You go through your life, especially being a part of musical theater, and it's like you see all these people going up and pursuing BFA degrees and doing all this and it's like, 'Dang, this seems like something that's so cool,'" Gray said, "but you're like, 'I obviously can't do that, I'm not as talented as they are.' It's like just something didn't click that I could do that and that I am talented enough to do it until about halfway through tenth grade, where it was like, wait, I can. I can do this."

Gray suggested any other students or adults considering taking up writing to "go for it" and "just write."

"Genuinely, that's the best advice I can give. Never stop because you never know where it's going to go and you're only going to get better the more you write."