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MACOMB TOWNSHIP — AJ Denomme has only been acting for a few years, but the Dakota High School graduate is flying to New York for a shot at the biggest prize in youth theater.
Denomme is one of Michigan’s two students up for the 17th annual National High School Musical Theatre Awards, set to take place at the Minskoff Theatre on Broadway. Also known as the Jimmy Awards, the accolades are for the best male and female high school actors.
“It is so crazy,” Denomme said. “This would have never been a possibility in my mind. And now that it’s real … I just can’t even begin to think about all the opportunities that are going to begin to come my way after this. It’s super exciting. I feel like it still hasn’t really hit me how big of a deal it is, and I don’t think it will until I’m on the flight to New York, but it still is really so amazing.”
While Denomme’s ticket to the Jimmy Awards was punched by being the male winner of the 2026 Sutton Foster Awards, the road to the theater began with a change made in 2022.
“I was a gymnast for 10 years, so I didn’t start theater until my freshman year of high school,” Denomme said. “I just did it originally as a hobby and for fun … I really didn’t have any intention of quitting (gymnastics) through high school. I remember there was a weird situation that I had with a lot of coaches quitting their jobs and they all moved locations, and this was all during the heart of COVID. The timing was just not working out right for me, and I decided to step back from it. I didn’t step back from gymnastics with the intention of going into theater; I had already stepped back and had room in my schedule to do theater.”
The theater was nothing new for Denomme. His mom is a veteran of student and community theater both on stage as an actor and behind the curtain as a director, and he had friends in the theater as well. A fateful choir trip to New York was what it took to change a hobby of acting into a passion for the artform, with Denomme getting a chance to see the musicals “Back to the Future” and — most impactfully — the Orpheus and Eurydice adaptation “Hadestown.”
“‘Hadestown’ was my all-time favorite one. That one was really impactful and super important to me today,” Denomme said. “That show is so beautiful … It incorporates the music into it so perfectly, and honestly better compared to so many shows I’d seen before. The characters are all well known outside of the musical — they’re Greek mythology — but they’re still uniquely written for the show and have their own tendencies. It was just beautiful seeing a story come to life in such a unique way, and I knew I had to be able to do that one day.”
From then on, Denomme threw himself into a gauntlet of academics and acting, balancing an early-college program between Dakota and Macomb Community College with acting in shows for Dakota Choirs and other, non-school productions. One 2024 production of “Charlie and Chocolate Factory” for the Warren Civic Theater saw Denomme share the stage with his mother, him in the role of Mike Teavee and she in the role of Cherry.
“Ever since I’ve been on stage, I’ve loved it,” Denomme said. “The immediate drawing factor to keep me (acting) was the people. I made so many new friends and the teachers here are great … But as years went on, I started to fall in love more and more with performing itself. I found more what it meant to me as a person and how much of my personality could be put into theater, and I began to dive into that more and find more love for it.”
In 2026, Denomme took on the role of FBI Agent Carl Hanratty in “Catch Me If You Can.” His work as the midcentury gumshoe caught the eyes of adjudicators from the Sutton Foster Awards, Michigan’s state-level high school theater awards. He joined three other Chippewa Valley Schools students at the Wharton Center in East Lansing and, on the strength of his performance of the number “Donny Novitski” from the show “Bandstand,” won the Sutton Foster Award for Outstanding Performers in a Leading Role for male students on May 31. Lillian Tang of Bloomfield Hills High School won the award for females.
“There were 148 kids sitting behind us, the ones who weren’t finalists and were sitting and watching and cheering us on,” Denomme said. “I was friends with so many of them and hearing them cheer me on was really supportive and really cool. And then the 2,000 people in front of me applauding was just — when you hear applause, it never gets old and it really is like an out of body experience. There’s so many people and you know that deep in there, there’s the people you care about and the loved ones who are there to support you.”
Next up is the trip to New York for the Jimmy Awards, which is set to be a whirlwind of activity between rehearsals and getting to explore and socialize around the Big Apple. While taking the top prize is certainly on Denomme’s mind, being able to meet and perform around so many theater professionals in the heart of the American stage is an invaluable opportunity in itself.
“The amount of Broadway professionals you are working with at the Jimmy Awards is insane,” Denomme said. “The music directors, the main directors, the choreographers all have insane resumes and insane amounts of connections … This opens so many things for me in this field for it being my career.”
However, the Jimmy Awards may go for Denomme, he’s looking for a rare, long break for activity once he comes back from the Minskoff Theatre.
“I’ve done 16 main production musicals in the past three and a half years, so I’ve been performing kind of back-to-back nonstop for the past three and half years,” Denomme said. “I figured theater is about to become my all day every day, and I want to spend some time with my loved ones and myself, honestly, homing in on some hobbies and activities that I love to do that are not theater-related and keep those in my back pocket as I go through life to avoid burnout.
“I’m honestly a little curious to see how I’m going to be when I take this break over the summer, because I have not had this much free time in, I don’t even know how long. I do feel like having a busy schedule keeps me sane a little bit. I always have something to do (and it) keeps me on my feet,” he said.
Once the fall comes around, it’s back to the grind in Ann Arbor. Denomme will be face-to-face with eight-class semesters as a musical theater major at the University of Michigan.
He said the intensity of the major made it so he could not attempt a minor.
If everything goes to plan and he graduates as a Wolverine, Denomme hopes to have a career in the performing arts before transferring his experience into new opportunities.
“I want to spend maybe the first 10 years performing in the city,” Denomme said. “After that, I would plan to be a teacher and still possibly go back to grad school, get my master’s and hopefully work at some musical theater intensive program. The main goal would be some university or institution.”
Denomme’s time on stage has been short — three and a half years, in his counting — but in that time he has achieved a level of achievement few student-actors ever will. But Denomme refuses to invite comparisons with his peers, stating that what one can achieve is greater than what any comparison may seem.
“For other young performers, the easiest thing that seems to be done is to compare yourself to other people,” Denomme said. “You get put in high school or community theater productions with, sometimes, 100 other performers. It’s so easy to compare yourself to them, but you have to remember there’s nothing to compare yourself to because no one can create the art that you can. My biggest advice, as a performer, is you have to embrace your personality, be yourself and find ways to put your personality into your art.”
The Jimmy Awards are on Monday, June 22. The event will be streamed live starting at 7:30 p.m. More information can be found at jimmyawards.com.
