The Gene Kelly Awards, Pittsburgh CLO's annual celebration of high school musicals, is going national.

The Nederlander Organization will join CLO to bring the annual competition, under a different name, to Broadway next year to honor the best actor and actress winners from some 30 regional competitions involving about 900 high schools.

Attendees will spend a week of auditions, interviews and rehearsals in New York, culminating with the awards presentation at Broadway's Palace Theater on June 1. Plans to televise it nationally are in the works.

The annual event will be known as the National High School Musical Theater Awards, with individual awards to be called "Jimmys,'' after James M. Nederlander, the 86-year-old chairman of the Nederlander Producing Co. It operates nine Broadway theaters as well as theaters in Detroit, Los Angeles, San Diego, Tucson, Ariz., Durham, N.C., Chicago and London, and agreed to sponsor the annual celebration, following the format begun in Pittsburgh in 1991.

The Kelly Awards competition annually involves up to 30 Allegheny County high schools, culminating in a showcase and awards ceremony that packs the Benedum Center. It has become the model for similar programs elsewhere, such as the Tommy Tune Awards in Houston and the Fifth Avenue Awards in Seattle.

Locally, the Kellys have had a hand in launching such Broadway careers as those of Gaelen Gilliland ("Legally Blonde"), Chris Peluso ("Assassins") and Sarrah Strimel ("Young Frankenstein"), as well as Zachary Quinto ("Heroes" on TV, Spock in "Star Trek" on film).

The CLO "has essentially been giving away its intellectual property," freely advising awards programs in other cities, which send observers to the event at the Benedum, CLO executive producer Van Kaplan said. The chief aim of going national, he said, is to get added visibility and "celebrate high school musical theater on a grand scale."

"The commercial theater rarely reaches out to what might be its future," said Nederlander executive vice president Nick Scandalios. "Broadway is this monolith, a dream, up on a hill, and it doesn't reach out very often."

He and Nederlander's chief marketing officer, Pittsburgh native Susan Lee, envision the NHS Awards as a way to both mentor young performers and develop audiences. The winners might never complete the professional climb to Broadway, but they and their schoolmates and families represent the theater audience of the future.

The regional programs lining up to participate the first year are those coordinated by companies such as the CLO, said Mr. Kaplan, who has been working primarily with other members of the National Alliance for Musical Theater. The 30 programs already enlisted include those in such cities as Kansas City, Cincinnati, Oklahoma City, Minneapolis, Raleigh, N.C., Fort Worth, Texas, San Jose, Calif., and Rochester, N.Y.

For the participants, one reward will be "playing the Palace," the legendary Broadway theater where the competitors will perform and the awards will be announced. But there will also be tangible rewards, still to be announced, including college and conservatory scholarships.

Mr. Kaplan said the new awards should do on the national level what the Kellys have done in Pittsburgh, encouraging school districts to invest more in the arts. There are now more than 100 high school musicals each year in greater Pittsburgh alone.

"This will raise that bar even higher," Mr. Kaplan said, adding he expects the new national competition will quickly enroll other regions.

The CLO has tried to move the Kellys to the national stage before. A documentary produced by Carl Kurlander attracted some attention but did not lead to a reality TV show as hoped, and a proposed national competition at Disney World never got off the ground.

Both the CLO and Nederlander, which would not reveal how much it will spend to sponsor the annual event, expect that the new program will change as it grows. "What it's going to evolve into, it'd be impossible to say," said Mr. Kaplan. He called Nederlander "the perfect partner -- it's synonymous with Broadway but also established all across the country."

Mr. Nederlander couldn't be reached for a comment because, as a part-owner of the New York Yankees, he has been absorbed in the All Star Game festivities in New York.