InterArts

For only two summers, those of 1985 and 1986, the El Dorado County School District had a summer school program for the arts called InterArts.  This program was brilliant because it brought together students interested in the arts from all the high schools into one program.  The first year, one hundred teens appeared together in the musical Sing Out Sweet Land on the stage of the Discovery Playhouse at the fairgrounds during the county fair.  This was the culminating experience of a six week program where students studied in “majors” and were introduced to secondary subjects during the early part of the morning and then rehearsed the show in the later part.  By one o’clock the day was over.  Somehow in this condensed amount of time we participants were split up into acting, dance, voice, band, art and technical theater classes, had rehearsal for the show and somehow it was all pulled together for opening night.  But, the best thing about this program was the integration of students from the three high schools.  Under no other circumstances would I have become such good friends with kids from the other high schools.

El Dorado High School’s strength was Drama and so those students dominated the acting class and a second session had to be added to accommodate the demand for the class.  Ponderosa High School’s strength was music and had the only men’s choir in the county, so the choir room was filled with boys from Ponderosa.  The El Dorado choir never had more than three or four boys tagging along, so Sue Beyaz of El Dorado, who took on the task of voice coach for the program, finally had a full chorus of boys during InterArts.  Georgette Barton was an English teacher who was versed in dance and very involved in local community theater and was put in charge of the dance class.  For all the boys that this program attracted, none of them took the dance class and it was all girls as expected.  What was remarkable was that there really was a dance class, for this was not something that was available during the school year.  If a kid took any form of dance they went to one of two private studios in the area.  The arts programs available at the smaller Oak Ridge High were limited and so those kids were sprinkled throughout the various disciplines and were in hog heaven to be studying and performing in proper facilities for a change.

The first summer of 1985, when I was leaving my junior year, the musical we produced was picked because it could be easily rehearsed in components and had a structure that naturally expanded to accommodate one hundred kids.  Sing Out Sweet Land wasn’t a great musical and it certainly isn’t well known, but it served InterArts very well.  The show had played Broadway in 1944 as a patriotic salute to American history through music––a typical war time idea to boost moral.  The show starred Alfred Drake and Burl Ives and was about a character named Barnaby who traveled through time beginning in Puritan days and hit key periods in scenes that each contained a popular song up through 1944.  For our production we cut off at the 1920s and jumped to our own created scenes for the 1960s and 1980s to bring the show up to date.  This idea was completely unauthorized of course, but it was a good idea and helped the show to be more relevant.  The original production ran thirteen weeks and basically disappeared, so it was a small miracle that anyone at all was producing it in 1985.

When the program started the students were in cliques according to their schools and without saying so explicitly, director Jim Orr pushed through the idea that individual school spirit had no place in the theater, we were to become our own unified company.  The audition process helped to level the students as they observed unfamiliar kids stepping forward to sing their audition songs, read scenes and go through choreography.  Talents emerged and the most serious hard working students flocked together and became a new clique made up of members of all schools.  Other cliques naturally formed based on areas of interest and they too were mixed up with kids from all schools and this aspect was broadening.  

Thanks to InterArts I had a great new group of friends from Ponderosa and Oak Ridge that lasted through my senior year and into the next InterArts summer.  We met up for movies and parties during the school year––we went to see each other’s school productions and concerts.  There was a great kind of arts camaraderie between schools and when I think back to that time I think of a number of peers from all schools as my best friends.

The second summer of 1986, when I was a graduated senior, I served as Director’s Assistant and participated in the choir and acting classes, but had little to do during rehearsals, except to watch.  My best pals from the first year were back along with half a new crowd of students.  This time the production was held at the Empire Theater on Main Street, which had turned into a live venue due to the new Placerville Cinema 4 taking over the movie business.  The Empire had an ample stage, though it had poor wing space and organizing the crowd of kids was a challenge, but it was nice to be in a real theater building with an act curtain.  The production was the musical Carnival, a Broadway hit of 1961 based on the Leslie Caron film, Lili, about an orphan teenage girl’s adventures with a French circus.  To make the show rehearsable, director Jim Orr cut the show way down and in a typical move for him, interpolated the song “Hi Lili, Hi Lo” from the film.  Jim liked to do that kind of thing––moving scenes around, writing new lines, adding songs from a film version.  I didn’t even know that the show had been cut or the song added because we received a typed manuscript that was the final version we performed.  A few years later when I happened to do the show in college I realized how altered our InterArts version had been.  Today in my capacity as licensing agent for Music Theatre International in New York, I know these kinds of cuts and changes to be against the Federal Copyright law and completely unethical, but in a six week summer program with one hundred kids, I guess you do what you have to do.

Jim Orr was a mysterious and interesting man.  He was the uncle of my friend Thea who grew up in Pollock Pines with her very American parents, though her uncle spoke in a British accent.  He had spent a lot of time in England and went back from time to time, retaining the influence of the locals I suspect.  During my life in high school, Jim Orr maintained the image of the professional theatre artist and was the man anyone interested in theatre was most excited to work with.  When he directed a show at Theatre El Dorado, the local community theatre, it always seemed to be above average and he commanded the very best from everyone who worked with him.  When working with kids, he was better than anyone else teaching theater at guiding an actor towards an honest and believable performance.  I can hear him now saying, “Don’t try to be, just be.”  Jim didn’t have a permanent job, but earned his daily bread as a substitute teacher who was very much in demand for English, Humanities and Drama classes.  He was entertaining in those classes, but also commanded attention and always taught us something––he wasn’t just a baby sitter.  

Jim Orr had my Humanities class in stitches when we were to all take turns reciting the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence.  Some mush-mouthed kid got up and recited, “That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the People to alter or to abolish it...” and Jim Orr interrupted in an extra thick British accent and mocked, “A ball of shit?”  After that every kid who stood up to recite the Preamble sounded like they were saying “a ball of shit” instead of “abolish it” and sent the class into gales of laughter.  Even when a kid tried extra hard to enunciate it was hilarious.  We had a good time with this, but we also learned the Preamble and we had a good lesson about delivering a speech with diction.

During my final senior semester I had made a good group of new friends doing a production of How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and these friends were all involved in Carnival as well, so my bond with these peers became very strong very quickly.  This made me feel heartsick when at the end of the summer I was to go off to college and leave them so soon.   It was difficult to break with friendships that had come to mean so much, even over such a short period of time.  Such are the transitions of life and as fate would have it, I have lost touch with several people who meant the world to me at the time, though I have retained contact with some.  Paul Tomei, who took over as El Dorado’s Drama teacher, played the lead in Carnival and we have maintained a close friendship through the years despite a separation of 3000 miles––in fact I was back in Placerville last December to attend his wedding.

Side story on Paul: he and I, along with friends Thea and Shelli, went down to the Sacramento Music Circus that summer of 1986 to see Rex Smith in a production of Oklahoma!  One of my favorite things to do after a Music Circus production was to go next door to the Clarion Hotel for dessert and we did.  In the lounge the cast was hanging out and in those days there was always a pianist.  The cast took turns getting up to sing and so we had an impromptu after hours cabaret show.  We all encouraged Paul to get up and sing––he had only recently discovered the power of his own resonant baritone voice.  With a little timidity, he asked the pianist if he knew “Old Man River.”  The pianist did and started to play an introduction.  A few bars in the pianist stopped, “You’ll kill yourself if we start the song there.”  The pianist took the song down a few steps and sixteen year old Paul, hitting those rolling lower notes, really did a beautiful job with the song.  The cast of Oklahoma! applauded and we were thrilled.

InterArts had been a test program for a possible arts magnet school.  After the summer of 1986 there was no more InterArts.  I was lucky, for I was the right age to participate in one of the greatest and most successful education experiments my home town community ever launched and it is too bad that the program couldn’t continue at least as a summer school program even if it never evolved beyond that.  The bringing together of the various schools with the common goal of working together to produce a musical was a huge advantage in our education. Not just because we were interested in the arts and this offered us another outlet, but because the very nature of that particular program taught us all so much about the idea of sharing our talents and getting to know our greater community outside of the bubble of our individual high schools.

In the previous February of that year I found a tap class.  I had wanted to learn to tap dance ever since I saw my first Gene Kelly movie when I was small and I picked it up quickly.  I wanted to really do something with my new skill outside of the dance studio and an opportunity presented itself directly following Carnival.  Berta Stead, a prominent arts enthusiast who was very involved in local theatre and music, spearheaded the idea of using the Empire Theater as a live arts facility.  She was busy working behind the scenes to keep programs going in the theater, but decided to step forward in a solo show called “Berta’s Here” as a way of introducing herself to the public.  She engaged a band and put together a cabaret program of standards to sing.  I can’t remember how it came about, but Berta needed an opening act and so I quickly formed “Tapping Away,” a tap dance group made up of myself and three friends.  I picked out the music and choreographed four numbers on my accumulated six months of tap lessons.  We rented tuxedoes and turned out a pretty good act––at least everyone gave us a lot of praise.  The funny thing was that the other boy dancer of the group, Steve, had the unfortunate occurrence of his taps falling off his shoes before the performance.  There was no fixing them, so during his duet when the audience would hear some solo tapping from him, I made all the tapping sounds behind the curtain while Steve danced it out front.  At one point, one of Steve’s dance moves kicked the curtain open for a moment, revealing me there tapping away behind the scenes.

“Berta’s Here” was my last hurrah and my one chance of performing on the Empire stage before it became an antique mall and then I went off to college.  Jim Orr gave me a worn book of Shakespeare monologues as a parting gift that I still have today.  Inside it was inscribed, “You have proven that what I share with young people has validity and blessings.  Growth and good fortune go with you.”  I treasure that book as my one physical connection to a man who came in and out of my life in various ways, but who was rather influential and very wise.  The book has also been very useful.  In the late 1990s when I was teaching teens in an arts program I used the book to pull out Shakespeare monologues for my students.  The binding is broken, the pages are stained and browning and I sometimes pull it off the shelf just to read the speech from Henry V., “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!”  I very much feel that we all had the spirit of that speech as one hundred teens burst upon the small town stages of Placerville for two summers and sang and danced our hearts out in a spirit of unusual communal unity.