Oct 6, 2005 10:16 AM
They’re everywhere.
Their names light up marquees on Broadway, and on movie and opera houses, concert halls and art galleries around the world. You’ve watched them on your favorite TV shows and they turn up in fashion houses and on the shelves at Barnes and Noble.
They are the star-studded alumni of Fiorello H. LaGuardia HS of Music and Art and Performing Arts.
“Open a playbill anywhere and one of our graduates will be listed,” LaGuardia music teacher and professional violist Paula Washington proudly noted.
Name dropping is easy: actors Jennifer Aniston, Ellen Barkin, Ving Rhames, Ron Eldard, David Krumholtz, Adrien Brody and Sarah Paulson; cabaret stars Eartha Kitt, Ben Vereen, Diahann Carroll; architect Charles Gwathmey; designer Isaac Mizrahi; conductors Leon Botstein, James Conlon and Gerard Schwarz; composer Cy Coleman; classical musicians Pinkus Zuckerman and Murray Perahia; soprano Catherine Malfitano; dancers Edward Vilella, Gary Chryst and Cora Cahn; and producer Steve Bochco — to name just a very, very few.
“Fame,” the popular 1979 movie about the shool, captured its creativity and energy and put LaGuardia on the map.
The faculty of the Manhattan school, many of them noted professionals and alumni themselves, are the nurturers and mentors of these stars of yesterday and today, and they are also their greatest fans.
Washington boasted that the students who put a variety show together on their own recently were “60 times better than anyone on ‘American Idol.’”
The studio classes — dance, drama, music, art and the many subsets of each — encourage closeness because students and their teachers spend two double or triple periods together every day for four years. Add to that the long hours after school at rehearsals for plays, musicals, concerts, and preparing for art exhibits. LaGuardia never seems to turn out the lights.
“There’s a sense of home here,” according to modern dance teacher Elisa King. “Students develop lifelong, loving relationships. They really connect.”
A day in the life of a LaGuardia student is a far cry from life in most city high schools, except for the four periods a day devoted to academics. On a routine day last spring, students were in the auditorium putting the finishing touches on the set for the opening that night of “Hotel Paradiso”; next door, actors were going over lines for the upcoming production of “Inherit the Wind”; and in the sun-drenched plaza at Lincoln Center, music students were delighting New Yorkers with Tchaikovsky’s “Symphony No. 6.”
It was LaGuardia Day at Lincoln Center, next-door neighbor of the school, and music teachers were showing off the talents they are nurturing. Jim Minenna was conducting the senior orchestra. Kevin Blancq had just finished leading the jazz band, finalist in the Duke Ellington jazz competition, which followed the symphonic band, led by Lucinda Santiago.
The school, a merger of the old HS of Music and Art and the School of Performing Arts, opened in 1984 with a state-of-the-art concert hall and theater, the first school in the nation to provide a free program for students with unique talents in the arts. And it’s no coincidence that Julliard and Lincoln Center are its good and friendly neighbors.
Tomorrow’s ballet stars, Broadway hoofers and choreographers move with ease and grace in and out of the studios, very focused and very much at home in their eighth-floor domain. But despite the excellent training these committed students get in all genres of dance, in choreogaphy and even career management, dance teacher and alumna Penny Frank, a professional dancer for 20 years who still teaches classes at the Martha Graham School, deplores the fact that “because the situation of the arts in America is so disgraceful today, too many fine American dancers and choreographers are in Europe where there are 50-fold more opportunities. It’s a tough world out there.”
Frank describes her 38 years at LaGuardia as “an incredible journey.” During these “marvelous years,” she said, “you get close to the kids and many are still close friends.” Although Frank retired last year, she continues to teach junior-level classes.
The school’s mission, she noted, had once been talent only — students were selected based only on auditions or portfolio — until it became more academically focused some eight years ago “so a lot of talented kids now can’t make the grade,” she said.
On the other hand, today’s students must meet high academic standards along with vigorous conservatory-style training. Many more of them are going on to the top colleges and conservatories in the country.
If requirements are high for students, the bar is exceptionally high for staff. Stephen Weinstach’s resumé included 25 years as a professional musician and a Ph.D., but he had to “scramble for education credits” to become a licensed accompanist for dance classes. “But,” he said, “this is not just any high school. It’s a very special place.”
Washington, who also has a doctorate and continues to play with chamber music groups, the Broadway Bach Ensemble and the Bergen Philharmonic, said of her 24 years at the school: “It’s like dying and going to heaven.”
As a student at Music and Art, she said, she had “some of the best teachers I’ve ever had, so I wanted to give back.”
Washington is concerned that the loss of music instruction in so many junior high schools has hurt the chances of talented students who can’t afford private lessons.
“Foreign students,” she said, “have the necessary skills when they apply because music and art are part of their basic education.”
While the consensus among staff seems to be that LaGuardia is a great school with astounding kids, staff development there, as in so many other schools, came in for some criticism.
King called it “90 percent irrelevant; so generic it doesn’t help anyone.” Washington would prefer “they don’t tell us what to do. Just let us do it, just unfetter us, take off the chains. It’s disrespectful to teachers. Nobody around here is shirking work.” Another who said, “We speak but nobody listens,” described the academic staff as “demoralized.”
LaGuardia Arts is blessed with very supportive parents and an active, star-studded alumni association with its own Web site (see below). Studio teachers agree the school remains a microcosm of the city’s diversity and still has its pick of the most gifted and talented students.
The stars of tomorrow.