February 3, 2005

Mills Lawn rocks in school musical

By Lauren Heaton

If memorizing the Preamble to the Constitution and learning the function of a conjunction sounds boring, talk to the Mills Lawn School students presenting an all-school musical next week on those very subjects. Most of them would probably say that the musical totally rocks.

Listen to them in between classes, on their way home from school and milling about downtown. They’re humming scholarly tunes about adverbs, the solar system and the passage of a federal bill as they rehearse and prepare for their big performance of Schoolhouse Rock Live! at the Paul Robeson Cultural and Performing Arts Center at Central State. The two performances take place on Saturday, Feb. 12, at 7 p.m. and Sunday, Feb. 13, at 2 p.m.

Nothing sticks to the mind like a verse set to music except one that is also set to groovy moves choreographed by Becky Brunsman, the Mills Lawn kindergarten teacher and the show’s director.

Based on a 1970s television cartoon series, Schoolhouse Rock is designed to teach kids math, history, English and science in a fun, catchy way. But that’s obviously not what the students like about it.

They like that they get to dress up like the planets and the stars and leap and pirouette across the stage, sixth-grader Stephanie Scott said during rehearsal last week. They like that they get to become cowboys and cowgirls and stomp out a line dance and then quickly change into pieces of scrolled paper to surprise a rapt audience, second-grader Joshua Seitz said. And they especially like rehearsals where they imitate the dances they can’t do, eat snow on their breaks and make up their own goofy words for the songs, fifth-grade student A.J. Wagner said.

They also like it because together the school’s 280 students will draw a crowd like no other from Yellow Springs to witness and praise the months of hard work students, teachers and staff have collaborated on together. Mills Lawn students and teachers have always been good at finding ways to “create a sense of common purpose” and learn from each other by working together, said Don Nowak, a sixth-grade teacher and head of the show’s coordinating committee of staff and parents.

“A thing like this is not possible without the enthusiasm of the staff,” Nowak said. “They’ve seen the value of it, and every teacher in the school is doing something, from costuming to the nuts and bolts of running the box office and taking attendance at rehearsals.”

The staff got an earful of results when, standing in the hallway last week, they could hear one of the show’s numbers on the school’s morning news program blaring out of every classroom in the building.

“When you have 280 kids all sing together, that’s the most wonderful feeling in the world,” said Brunsman, who gets energized by the dozens of all-school performances she has choreographed and directed for nearly 30 years. Schoolhouse Rock follows Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in 1999 and Lost in the ’50s in 2001 as the school’s third major performance at Central State.

Like its predecessors, this year’s show is likely to draw more than 1,600 people over the two performances. The talent of the students, whose voices and dancing abilities are near professional quality, will be well worth it, Nowak said.

“We knew some of these students were good, but we didn’t know they were that good,” Nowak said.

The students are impressed with each other too, and they support and learn from the cooperation that is required to put together a dance number that involves first- through sixth-grade students. They are amazingly patient with each other, Brunsman said.

“The older ones look out for the little ones, and when you watch them watch their peers they’re not even breathing,” she said.

Many of the students spent multiple summers performing in YS Kids Playhouse productions and are already old hands on the stage. Five years of previous theater experience helped sixth-grader Adam Zaremsky land his first major role as the new teacher returning to his past to review his grade school lessons with the Schoolhouse Rock Gang. It’s a lot of work being the lead, but he likes being one of the few who doesn’t have to sing and dance and can focus on acting, he said.

When the call for auditions went out in October, 120 students tried out for the main roles. With a chance to prime so many capable and enthusiastic thespians, Brunsman and the show’s producers, Becky O’Brien and Amy Minehart, expanded the cast to give each student a stand out role.

Mills Lawn’s production of Schoolhouse Rock is created almost entirely in-house from a raw musical score, Brunsman said. Music Theater International sent along with the music some theatrical suggestions, which “were just horrendous,” she said, and the school staff set to work to design something that was “up to Mills Lawn standards.”

Minehart, who teaches art, and fifth-grade teacher Jeananne Turner-Smith co-choreographed one of the numbers, and parent Jo Frannye Reichert took on another, while music teacher Mary Kay Franz taught the all-school chorus in her music classes. Roberta Semler, the Reading Center coordinator, and parent Jan Amstutz attended to the costumes, and all drew on their strengths to cover whatever was needed to put on the show, Nowak said.

With the intensity of production activity and after-school rehearsals mounting toward opening night, Mills Lawn Principal Christine Hatton is busy trying to keep students on academic task during the day and stay out of Brunsman’s way, she said. Hatton has looked in on rehearsals along the way and spent some time working up her own part in the teachers’ number at the end of the show. She expects to be just as surprised by the finished product as the rest of the audience.

“Becky can hold the whole school in the palm of her hand. She doesn’t need me,” Hatton said. “I’m learning from her.”

Everyone in the school will learn from the show they created together, which is nearly ready for curtain call.

Tickets for Schoolhouse Rock Live! are $3. They are available at Mills Lawn through Feb. 11 and can also be purchased at the door for the same price.