SSTI Opens Its 19th Season in Beaufort with All Shook Up

Broadway’s Jelani Remy directs the Elvis-inspired musical comedy as Southeastern Summer Theatre Institute brings its 2026 season “North of the Broad.”

For nearly two decades, the Southeastern Summer Theatre Institute has helped make the Lowcountry a summer destination for ambitious, professional-caliber musical theatre. Known to many simply as SSTI, the program has built a national reputation for pairing talented young performers and technicians with working Broadway artists, designers, musicians, and theatre professionals to create full-scale productions that feel far beyond the expectations of a typical summer student program.
This season, SSTI is bringing that experience across the river.

For its 19th season, the organization will present its full summer lineup at Beaufort High School while construction continues at its longtime Hilton Head Island venue. The temporary move “North of the Broad” gives audiences in Beaufort, Port Royal, Lady’s Island, Fripp Island, St. Helena, and the surrounding Sea Islands a rare opportunity to experience SSTI’s nationally recognized productions close to home.

The season opens with All Shook Up, a high-energy musical comedy inspired by the music of Elvis Presley. Set in a quiet 1950s town turned upside down by the arrival of a guitar-playing stranger, the show follows a colorful cast of characters as they discover love, identity, and the courage to follow their hearts. Filled with romance, laughter, and rock-and-roll spirit, All Shook Up features some of Presley’s most beloved hits, including “Jailhouse Rock,” “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” and the title anthem “All Shook Up.”

At the helm of the production is Broadway’s Jelani Remy, whose credits include Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of The Temptations, The Lion King, and Back to the Future.

“We’re thrilled to have Jelani returning to lead this production,” says SSTI founder Ben Wolfe. “He has the ability to bring an entire community together with his kindness and collaborative spirit. What better person to lead SSTI into our next chapter in Beaufort?”

That next chapter is part of a much larger story.

What began as a class project for Wolfe during his sophomore year of college has grown into one of the country’s most ambitious theatre training programs. Today, SSTI operates as both a producing company and a training ground, bringing together emerging artists and seasoned professionals from across the United States to create musicals on a scale more often associated with major regional theatre.

Each summer, SSTI mounts two fully staged productions complete with a New York-based orchestra, large scenic builds, custom costumes, and a full technical operation. More than 40 working professionals travel to the Lowcountry to lead the work, including directors, designers, electricians, carpenters, musicians, and faculty from many of the nation’s leading theatre programs. They work alongside a highly selective company of high school and rising college performers and technicians from across the country.

The result often surprises first-time audience members.

“I love talking to audience members at intermission who perhaps arrived skeptical, and maybe even a little scarred from sitting through a typical ‘high school musical,’” Wolfe says. “Their jaws are on the floor.”

Wolfe often compares the experience to the world of sports.

“Attending an SSTI show is like going to a minor league baseball game,” he says. “You’re watching the future of the art form on our stage.”

That description is fitting. SSTI has often been called “the minor leagues of Broadway,” and its alumni can now be found working on stages and screens around the world. Performers from recent SSTI productions have gone on to appear in major professional productions, including the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical The Outsiders.

The organization has also earned a loyal local following and has been named Lowcountry’s Best Live Theatre three times in recent years.

Still, the SSTI experience is not defined by talent alone. It is also defined by scale.

Longtime scenic designer and technical director Matthew Imhoff describes the backstage environment as a place of constant creativity and motion.

“At any given moment, around every turn, there is something interesting happening,” Imhoff says. “Onstage you might have a 40-foot, two-story rotating set, and then in the next room you’ve got 10,000 custom wooden rivets being painted and prepped to cover the side of an ocean liner for the next show. It’s a theatremaker’s dream, and it’s realized work on a scale that many of us don’t get to work on during the rest of the year.”

That same ambition will carry into SSTI’s 2026 season at Beaufort High School. Following All Shook Up, the season will continue with Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, directed by Tony Award nominee Jenn Colella, whose Broadway credits include Suffs, Come From Away, and Chaplin.

For Beaufort-area audiences, SSTI’s summer in town is more than a change of venue. It is an invitation to experience the kind of large-scale musical theatre that has helped define the organization for nearly 20 years, now right here in the heart of the community.

All Shook Up will be performed at Beaufort High School, located at 84 Sea Island Parkway on Lady’s Island. Performances are scheduled for June 26, June 27, and July 3 at 7:30 p.m., with matinee performances on June 28, July 4, and July 5 at 1 p.m.
All tickets are $45, and all seats are reserved. Tickets are on sale now at SummerMusicals.com or by calling 866-749-2228.