- [Announcer] "Art Beat!"

is made possible in part by the Chesapeake Bay Wine Classic Foundation.

(man humming) - We all set?

All right.

- Very good.

- Thank very much.

Here we go.

What you gonna do tomorrow?

- [Assistant] I haven't really thought about it.

- No?

- [Assistant] No, I don't give it much thought really.

- You better.

Art organizations have to think about tomorrow also.

Where's the next generation gonna come from?

How do you develop young audiences?

This time we're gonna take a look at how the Virginia Stage Company reaches out to the next generation of theatergoers.

That's on this edition of "Art Beat!"

(upbeat music) If you were running an arts organization, you'd be preoccupied with the here and the now.

The things you have to do to sell the tickets and to fill the seats and pay the bills.

And after you've satisfied yourself that you've done everything you could do to put your performance or exhibition in front of the public, you might stop to wonder about where the next generation of arts patrons is coming from.

How do you make education a priority while maintaining your core mission to uplift, challenge and to entertain?

Hi, I'm Jeff Lindquist.

On this program, we're going to learn how one local arts organization, the Virginia Stage Company, answers that question.

The VSC takes its educational mission into the community and face to face with students one school at a time.

With me are Casey Sams and Marc Payne.

Welcome - Thank you.

- Thank you.

- Casey, what exactly is Virginia Stage Company's outreach program, Theater for Kids?

- Theater for Kids, we have several different programs.

The biggest is our touring program where we take two shows a year, and we go out to schools all over the Hampton Roads area in Norfolk and Virginia Beach, and sometimes as far away as Richmond and do shows, mostly for elementary school kids.

Also some middle schools this year.

We're hoping to branch out into high school next year, and we just take a show right into the school and set up in whatever kind of space they can give us, their cafetorinasium and.

- [Jeff] Interesting.

- And produce our show for kids, usually of a group of about two to 300 at a time.

It's great.

- Very good.

Now Marc, you're an actor.

- Yes.

- In the show that's going on now.

- Yes.

- The name of which is?

- "Dream Keeper," yes.

- [Jeff] "Dream Keeper," okay.

What's it like performing for kids?

- You have to have a lot of energy to perform for kids.

I mean, I've loved it for like four or five years, and yeah, you really have to be on your toes, and you have to really know what you're doing, and you know your stuff 'cause you can't lie to kids.

They always see through everything, so, but it's a challenge.

- So they're not a very forgiving audience.

- No, no.

(Casey laughing) - You could say they're brutally honest.

- Yes, exactly, yeah.

- Yeah, and how long have you been with this production?

- Well, we started rehearsing back in, I think January 10th we came into rehearsal, so since January, yeah, 10th.

- Cool, yeah, well, very good, very good.

The focus of this Spring's Theater for Kids Project is "The Dream Keeper," which has only started to make the rounds of the regional schools.

We're gonna take a look now at how the most recent tour got started.

- Are you ready?

- [Kids] Yeah!

- [David] These kids are excited.

This is the world premier of an original play.

It's been in rehearsal for three weeks, and these students are the first live audience anywhere to see it.

This is Coleman Place Elementary School in Norfolk.

The performers are the Virginia Stage Company, and the play is called "The Dream Keeper."

(upbeat music) - Earlier in the year, the Virginia Stage Company did a production of a show called "Blues for an Alabama Sky," which is a show for adults that's set in the Harlem Renaissance.

And we wanted to do something that we could take out into the schools that would relate to something that their parents would've seen on the main stage.

So we started looking around for a show about the Harlem Renaissance, and there really wasn't one out there.

So we commissioned this one to be written for us.

♪ Just give that rhythm everything's good ♪ - We're gonna be touring this show through elementary and middle schools in Norfolk and Virginia Beach and Hampton, and as far away as Goochland and the Smithfield, all over the state, (melodic singing) - [David] Coleman Place and Virginia Stage Company work together in the Partners in Education Program.

In this partnership, the Virginia Stage Company conducts workshops and performances at the school.

In return, the students of Coleman Place Elementary get to see projects like this as they go on tour.

It's a partnership that both sides value highly.

- We had our first performance, this is the first time anyone's seen this show.

So we, Casey, myself, the sound designer, sat in the back and figured out what's wrong with it basically.

The audience told us a great deal.

This is our adopted elementary school.

We try out all of our programming here.

It's a way that they can afford our programming, and it's a way to give us an audience that has a rapport with us.

- The exposure to theater is essential to the students.

As a educator, I feel that way.

It's something that the students don't normally see.

It's not something that's usually in their homes.

And it's a chance for students to see a different way of storytelling, and storytelling and reading is so important.

- The world I seek, what do you mean?

- Look it, we heard you were slacking off with your assignment, and we.

- What my barbaric friend is trying to say is that we hope.

- [Kenton] It's important for us to develop new material, and if we just developed it and send it out and not continued to grow it, we would not get the piece to where it needs to be.

- [Michelle] I can't overemphasize how much these programs mean to our kids.

Just look at their faces.

- [Casey] This is our opportunity to educate our future audiences, to expose these kids to the excitement of live theater.

Maybe some of them will get interested in theater and wanna do some of it themselves when they get a little bit older.

It's really a way for us to get out into the community.

So many of these kids have never seen live theater before.

This is really our chance to share what we love with this part of the community.

(melodic singing) - [David] And share it they will.

"The Dream Keeper" will be on tour throughout Virginia over the next several months.

This is part of Virginia Stage Company's plan to educate the audiences of the future.

For "Art Beat!"

I'm David Ferrero.

- The Theater for Kids has been around for about four years now, right?

What other type of programming have they done in those four years besides "The Dream Keeper"?

- Well, our oldest programming is our student matinee series where we bring in kids, high school, middle school, some elementary school kids to the Wells Theater, and they see some of the shows that we do on our main stage, our big shows.

And that program's been around probably the longest, probably four or five years.

Then of course we have our touring program that has historically gone out to elementary schools, and that's "Dream Keeper" is part of that.

In our touring program, we've done shows like "The Emperor's New Clothes" we did earlier this year with, one of our characters in this production was deaf, so we included American Sign Language in the show.

It was fun.

- Cool.

- And we did a show last year called "Africa Explains."

That was a collection of African folk stories.

That's some of the stuff we've done.

The latest project that we're working on right now is a program called "Critics Circle," where we're bringing high school kids who write the movie and art reviews for their high school newspapers, and we're bringing them into the Wells Theater along with their newspaper faculty person, and we're having a little round table with Charlie Hensley, our artistic director, to talk about the critical process and how they go about writing a review for theater, hopefully without biasing them too much.

And then they get to see our shows, and then they'll go back to their home schools, and they'll write their reviews and send a copy to us, and we'll disseminate all the reviews that are written to all of the kids that have been to the Critics Circle, so they get a chance to see what other kids are thinking.

And we're going to do that for our next two main stage shows "Golf with Alan Shepherd" and "Othello."

So we're very excited about that.

- Fancy, so not only a whole new generation of theater goers, but a whole new generation of theater critics.

- That's right.

- Oh dear.

(both laughing) - Well, hopefully educated theater critics.

- Now as Director of Education, what do you do?

- Oh boy, I oversee these programs.

I make sure that they're operating smoothly.

When I get a chance, I go out into the schools and do afterschool programs with the kids.

I get to teach a little bit and play some games.

I make sure we've got actors to do our shows.

I make sure we have directors to direct them and designers to design them.

- And did you, do you write?

- I have written some.

I will be, it looks like I'm going to be writing one of the pieces that will be doing next year.

So that will be fun for me.

I've done some directing in the program as well.

- Now how did, you didn't write "Dream Keeper"?

- No, a woman named Bea Boyd, who's from Texas wrote this show for us.

We decided to do "Dream Keeper" when we picked the main stage season last year.

We did a show earlier this year called "Blues for an Alabama Sky."

- [Jeff] Right.

- That's set in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance.

And we thought we wanted to do a show that would be more specifically for a younger audience that would be about the Harlem Renaissance.

So that's where we got the idea to do "Dream Keeper," and then we found somebody who really knew a lot about the Harlem Renaissance to write this show for us.

- So what were some of the, as this evolved then, how did you start it?

I mean, you got the playwright, but then where did you go?

- Well, we went to the playwright, and we told her that we were interested in a piece that would be appropriate for elementary and middle school aged kids that would be somewhere between 45 minutes and an hour long that would involve four actors and a mixed race cast.

And then we left her alone, and she came back to us at the beginning of this year with her first draft of the script.

And then we kind of hemmed and hawed and went back and forth and figured out what was important in the educational content and how we could make it play.

And then Kenton Yeager, who's our Associate Artistic Director at Virginia Stage Company actually directed the show.

And he went into rehearsal with Marc and the rest of the actors, and it was a very interesting process for all of them to work with a brand new script.

Usually when you have an established script, if an actor finds a part of the script that doesn't really work for them, well, they need to find a way to make it work.

- [Jeff] Right, right.

- With a brand new script, there were lots of places where they went, well, let's play with this and see what we can come up with.

So it really has been an emergent design as it goes along.

- Very good, very good.

When we return, we'll talk more about "The Dream Keeper" and cultivating young audiences.

And later in the program we're gonna find out more about the music that's part of this play about the Harlem Renaissance.

Stay with us.

(upbeat music) Welcome back to "Art Beat!"

With us are our guests, Casey Sams and Marc Payne of the Virginia Stage Company.

Now we hinted a little bit about the Theater for Kids that's gonna be touring around the Hampton Roads area.

Tell me a little bit about the touring, and is it just gonna tour in Hampton Roads?

- Mostly in Hampton Roads.

We do have a few shows that go outside the area.

We're gonna be in Goochland, Virginia.

- [Jeff] Goochland.

- Goochland.

- [Jeff] Yeah.

- A couple shows up on the Eastern Shore coming up.

We're happy to travel further a field when we get the opportunity, but it's a fairly new program, and we really do try and stick pretty close to home.

- And when is this, how long will you be touring?

- Well, we started January 31st was our first tour date.

And we tour through March 17th.

- March 17th.

And are you doing one show?

Do you just do one show a day?

- It depends on the school.

We regularly do two shows a day.

- [Jeff] Two shows a day.

- Especially when we're right in the home turf area.

Lots of times these poor actors have to get up early and go set up at one school in the morning and they answer some questions, and they load it back into the van, and they drive to another school, and they set it up again, and they do it all over again in the afternoon.

- Are school kids gonna be the only people who can see this?

- No, we have some public performances coming up in March too.

- And where will those be?

- They'll be in the Black Box Theater.

That's the Governor's School Performance space.

It's on Granby Street in downtown Norfolk.

And those performances will be March 11th and 12th and the 18th and 19th.

- Very good.

- Yeah.

- Now Marc, she's talked enough.

Let me ask you something.

- [Marc] Sure.

- Tell me, you got the exciting part, you're the actor.

Now tell me about your role, this role that you're playing in "The Dream Keeper."

- Well, I play Sammy's grandfather, and when the play starts out, my character's 80 years old, and he's talking to her about the Harlem Renaissance.

And of course she doesn't listen or understand or care for the most part.

And then what happens is she gets sucked into a time warp, and she goes back in time, and then she lands on Lenox Avenue.

And we, the next scene we see the grandfather, younger grandfather, probably mid 20s, and he is the emcee for this club downtown in Harlem, or I should say uptown in Harlem called the Oleroo.

And we do a little music, we do a little dance, we do a little poetry.

And she just gets the opportunity to perform and to sing as a guest artist in this club, which she doesn't know that is going to happen.

So she has the opportunity to sing a little bit too.

So yeah, and we get the message out about Harlem and about the different things, the philosophies that happened during that time, and so that she can learn her lesson, so to speak.

And in the end of the play, I come back as old grandpa again, and, you know, of course she's shaken and a little crazy.

- [Jeff] Is that hard to do, to play the two ages?

- Yes, it's very hard to do because I find myself going from the old character, actually, I'll, at the end, I'll play old grandpa, but I'll still be young grandpa because we've done all this dancing, all this music, all this other stuff.

And so it's hard to kinda make that transition 'cause I come out in the beginning, and I'm old, you know, and I do my thing, and then at the end I have to come back again and to sort of revisit that character.

So yeah, it's tough.

Some days it's really rough.

- Yeah, a lot of people always kind of dream about being an actor, you know, what it takes to become an actor.

How did you, how did you go about getting this role?

- Well, I had to audition.

They had an ad in the paper for like a, I think it's a general call for Virginia Stage Company.

And I just happened to go there one day, and I auditioned for Kenton Yeager, and he said, well, you know what, we have, the education director might wanna take a look at you for this other piece they've got coming up.

So I came back, and then I met Casey, and I got to audition again and then read a little bit from the script.

And of course when they said that they were going to do like, you know, Minnie the Moocher and poems by Langston Hughes, I mean, they pulled me in immediately.

So I was like, well, yeah, I wanna do this.

You know what I mean?

So I was all juiced up and ready to go from the first moment I heard about this piece, yeah.

- Now how many actors are in the show?

- Four.

- Four.

And who are the other actors?

- We have a woman named Jill Sanderson, who's originally from Alabama.

And Ben Patch, who's from Arizona.

- [Jeff] Arizona.

- And yeah, and Kim Bibbins, who's also a Norfolk local.

So we're pulling 'em in from all over the place.

- Now, Marc, you're also a Norfolk local also.

- [Marc] Yes, I am a Norfolk local.

- And I understand, yeah, and I understand too that you had recently you performed for your former elementary school - Today.

- [Jeff] Today?

- We did that, yeah.

We went to Larry Moore Elementary School, and I haven't been to Larry Moore since like 1979.

And so it's been a long time.

- [Jeff] What was that like?

- It was really weird, man.

It was weird because I hadn't been in the school in so long, you know, and when I was there I was like, what, 13?

And so things, the perspective has changed a lot.

The building looks totally different than what it did when I was younger.

Some things are gone, you know, some things are still there.

The cafeteria's the same.

- [Jeff] Teachers?

- No.

- [Jeff] No?

- Two teachers that I had, both male teachers, I went around asking the other teachers if they knew these guys, and you know, they since retired.

But yeah, I did go in there and asking about them, yeah.

But it was, it was a good experience, man.

We had a great time.

- Friends' kids, kids of friends or anything?

- Oh man, you know, like I said, I left, the last time I was in a Norfolk Public School was when I was 13, so I went to Portsmouth after that.

So, but yeah, it was really, it was really, really weird.

- [Jeff] That's cool.

- [Marc] Yeah.

- Good.

- [Marc] We had a great time though.

We had a great show there.

- When we return, we're gonna look behind the scenes to see how this play about the Harlem Renaissance that uses the music of the period as an important element goes on the road without a touring orchestra.

Stay with us.

(upbeat music) Welcome back.

Our "Art Beat!"

cameras went behind the scenes to see how the music for "The Dream Keeper" was made.

The Virginia Stage Company obviously would like to take the dream keeper into as many schools as they can fit into their schedule.

And to do that, the program has to be affordable.

To be affordable, it needs to require, quite frankly, fewer mouths to feed.

Taking a jazz trio on the road with a touring company clearly wasn't in their plans.

Here's a look at how the Virginia Stage Company created the music for this performance.

♪ It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing ♪ ♪ Do wop do wop do wop do wop ♪ - [David] Here's a look at a scene from "The Dream Keeper."

There are songs, there is music, but there is no band.

How does that work?

The music has been recorded earlier.

This is a recording session at Western Branch High School on a cold crisp Saturday afternoon in January.

The purpose of the people gathered here, some of whom are meeting for the first time, is to create a musical soundtrack for the touring performance.

- Right now we're doing the, the live record.

We've got three songs that we'll be singing in it.

We can't travel with an orchestra or a jazz combo.

So we've brought together three jazz musicians that are gonna be recording it for us.

There'll be live singing to playback.

So right now we're laying the tracks down, and we'll go in and and master it this weekend.

And it's pretty much our playback tape.

(upbeat music) - [David] The musicians, bassist Greg Armejo and drummer Beth Lane, are local professionals that find themselves working on this day with Western Branch High School music director, Chris Titko.

Titko has been rehearsing with the actors for several weeks and has developed practice piano tracks so that the actors can rehearse to tempo with movement.

The musicians have never met one another before today.

In fact, they haven't even seen the music until this recording session.

That's why they're called professionals.

- Yeah, I just have to, I'm just holding this over is what, that's all that's happening.

- Yeah, but then I was jumping on the end of one.

- Oh, that's okay, that's okay, that'll work.

- And you're not there.

- Because that gives it bah ah type of feel.

- You know what, I think I'm gonna change mine.

I'm gonna change mine to a quarter.

- Can we try it?

Just the intro.

- [Chris] Beginning?

One, two, a one, two.

(upbeat music) - The play is not a musical per se, it is about music in that era.

So without the music, you don't really get a feel for what the era was about.

And so we decided we'd take three tunes that sort of told us a lot about that era and use those in the show.

- We brought the actors in to just pretty much bring the energy into the room.

We're not looking to record the actors.

In fact, we run tape once with the actors just to get the energy, to get the pacing, to make sure that the musicians who have never really worked this before, they all pretty much met today and have a real clear understanding of what we're trying to do with this piece.

♪ This is a story about Minnie the Moocher.

♪ - It's just trying to get them all on the same page, kind of get them into the groove, and then we pull the singer out and then we just run the tracks for the musicians.

- One, two, three, four.

(upbeat music) - I wanted to be a part from the actual sound of the instruments in this room 'cause I was close micing every instrument.

And then I feed it into my board, and I'm recording each instrument on its own, own track.

It's called a tracking session.

And all I wanna be sure is I'm getting a good quality sound, a sound that I'm gonna want later, and at a good level so that then I can come back and once all the musicians are gone, I can mix down the music, which I'll go back and do.

And so if I want a little more piano, I can add a little more piano.

If I want, you know, less kick drum, I can take out some kick drum.

I can also alter the sounds once we have it to tape.

- [David] A couple takes, some notes, some rehearsal, and the tracks are recorded and ready to mix.

- Anytime you get pros together who don't know each other, you have to see if you can have a good working relationship or not.

Musicians and theater folks are notorious for arguing because of issues like that.

And there were no arguments today, and everybody got along really well.

And that's important, and that's what I think it's supposed to be about in the arts is that we're all coming together after the same goals and achieving them together rather than sort of in our separate corners.

- [David] The end result is a tape that will accompany the sound designers and the touring company as they take "The Dream Keeper" into schools over the next few months.

For "Art Beat!"

I'm David Ferrero.

- This tracking session, how are the actors involved with his tracking session?

That looked kind of neat.

- Yeah, well, it was, it was a great experience.

We were just brought in as a way of rehearsing with the group, when they were doing the music, because Chris, the guy who actually did the playing, the piano playing and the arranging wanted us to be there so that we could sing the song through once.

And then with that energy and flair, he would be able to record it, and still keep that same energy going.

He felt it was important to have us there to sing the song.

Otherwise, if you just play the music without having the actors there to at least give you an idea of what they're gonna do, you won't get the same type of magic out of the music.

So he wanted us there to sing the song maybe once or twice through, and then they would send us out of the way, record it immediately so they could get a good, a good version, yeah.

- Was there anything that happened during the session that you found unique or didn't know that they did that at all?

- A lot of improvisation.

- [Jeff] Really?

- As far as, yeah, as far as different, different sounds.

And see they would play the tune first, and then when one of us would get out there and sing along with them, they would find something different.

So they would add a little something here or take away something there just to make the whole thing gel together.

And I think that was the first time that those three people had gotten together to play was that first day.

So they got together and practiced maybe an hour or so, and then they just brought us in, and they started recording, yeah.

- Wow.

- [Marc] So it was.

- Because it sounds fantastic.

- [Marc] Yeah.

- And it turned out great.

- [Marc] Yeah.

- That's it for this edition of "Art Beat!"

Now be with us next week when we'll go to the Virginia Opera and learn about the premiere of a new children's opera.

That's next week on "Art Beat!"

Till then, I'm Jeff Lindquist.

Take Care.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] "Art Beat!"

is made possible in part by the Chesapeake Bay Wine Classic Foundation.

(static) (upbeat music)