Jake James just won high school theater's biggest prize. On Broadway.

When we covered the Shuler Hensley Awards in June, Milton High's Jake James had just been named Georgia's Best Leading Actor for his turn as Jacob Jankowski in Water for Elephants, the production that took the state's top prize. It turns out Georgia was the warm-up.

On June 22, at the Minskoff Theatre on Broadway, James won Best Performance by an Actor at the Jimmy Awards, the National High School Musical Theatre Awards and the most prestigious stage in high school theater. The ceremony, hosted by SNL alum Bowen Yang, crowned James from a field of the best young performers in the country, and he marked the moment by performing a song from Water for Elephants on a Broadway stage. If you caught the Milton Theatre Company's staging earlier this year, you saw a national-champion performance before the nation did.

The Eagle connections didn't stop there: the night also featured a performance by Broadway's McKenzie Kurtz, herself a Milton High alum and a member of the school's Wall of Fame. Watch Jake's Jimmy Awards performance →