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Home Again

Allen’s talk. at the end of the show.

Back during the approximately 15 years that Joyce Hall and I were teaching performing arts, we talked about or taught a lot of subjects. Of course acting, singing and dance (the triple threat) were at the top of the list. Then we got into lighting and sound and many other technical areas, with a lot of help from professionals and friends outside the school system. Believe me, they did not teach me how to build a set or light a show at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. But we learned and we passed everything on to these performing arts students, who were like little sponges always wanting more.
Some of these many students became Professionals.
Are we proud of these actors, singers, dancers and musicians? You bet we are.
But a lot of these students didn’t become performers. Some of them made their professional choices in fields related to the performing arts. We have agents, costumers, set designers, graphic designers, and fine artists, we have production managers and publicity managers and even the general manager of the new Jazz at Lincoln Center is a former student.
Then, there is “everybody else”. That term has a special meaning to our old Performing Arts alumni. When staging a show or choreographing a dance or making musical assignments there is inevitably a group left over that is given a general assignment or direction. That group is “everybody else”.
We eventually learned not to use that term because of the bad connotation.
Tonight, however, it is “everybody else” that I want to talk about for a minute. As a measure of success of almost any training program, whether Performing arts or math or football, it is not the “stars” that determine a successful program. It is everybody else. We love our stars and we seem to have an abundance of them but we also love everybody else.
These people are lawyers, doctors and pilots and policemen (and women) and business owners and office workers and teachers and the list, of course, goes on. Joyce and I many times discussed whether we were doing the right thing for this student or that student. We usually came to a rapid agreement and moved on. When you are a teacher with many, many students, you don’t have a lot of time to spend on each decision. But somehow we seemed to survive and I know we (Joyce and I spoke for each other all the time) , we, are very proud of “everybody else”.
So far, I have not had any Performing Arts Alumni express sorrow for being a part of the PA training program back in school. And for that I am truely greatful.
And to support this even further, there are a number of studies regarding the arts in the schools but I would like to reference this one from California. Researchers looked at 25,000 students and found that those who were involved with music scored significantly higher in math than those who were not. And they found that students involved with Drama had better reading skills than those who were not, and, they found that students involved in drama were less likely to tolerate racism. So, in these days of the budget crunch, as arts programs are being ‘down sized’, and all efforts are being directed to the new mandatory testing, I suggest if you want to increase math and reading skills, don’t ‘downsize the arts, but instead “supersize them”. As our good friend Ray Recchi said, “The Arts are Not Desert”
I would like to close with one more thought. Amidst all the training and related subjects we tried to include as part of the Performing Arts program, there is one thing we did not talk about. The question is, “how do we cope when we start to lose our old friends and teachers?” The question didn’t seem relevant back then and I don’t think we would have had an answer anyway. We have lost quite a few of our friends and especially my friend, and guide, and protector, and psychic, and teaching partner Joyce Hall.
The words Lost and gone don’t seem to be right. How can anyone be gone when they are regularly in your thoughts. Since Joyce and I almost always knew what each other would be thinking, I feel her presence here as if she were just backstage somewhere out of site. Generally, I like to think of her as being out of town doing another show.
And we will all catch that show sooner or later.
Here and Now, however, on this very stage, this great bunch of Hall Hill Performing Arts Alumni and a great bunch of current (or just graduated) Nova students are going to try something new. For about the last 10 years of our teaching careers, we used the title song from the musical Applause as sort of a signature song for the program.
So now, I give you the old Hall Hill Performing Arts Alumni, with some of their own kids, and with some new Nova students, together, in Applause.

The Program

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The Show

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