Allan Appel Photo
“I want to improve the lives of my subjects,” declared the king, also known as eighth-grader Matt Levin.
He was reading lines from A Stone In The Road, a kids’ morality tale about a king who puts a giant rock in the street and then hides as he evaluates the kindness, or lack thereof, of his various subjects who wander by and react to the obstacle.
“You’re doing an awesome job,” replied his acting teacher, Jennifer Nelson. “You need to limp a little more and you could also use a cape.”
So went one of numberless interchanges between aspiring creative kids and their teachers and mentors as the Shubert’s Theater and Arts Camp got under way this week.
Kids keep their schedule on a card on a lariat around their necks.
The camp, specifically tailored for fifth to eight graders, runs from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. for two weeks and is in its fourth season at its regular campus, Co-Op Arts and Humanities High School on College Street. The first session is booked solid and runs through July 17. The second session begins on July 20 and runs through July 31.
The camp offers two tracks: musical theater and general arts, ranging from acting to short film production, ceramics, creative writing, steel pan drumming, and backstage and tech skills. Each of three classes that the kids elect runs 90 minutes. (Click here for previous story about the camp and its steel drumming class.)
Levin is a veteran. He has attended for all the previous seasons, during which he had leading roles as a thespian in the culminating productions. This year, he said, he is branching out from musical theater with acting in the morning, but then short film production later, and backstage tech and graphics and design in the later afternoon.
{media_3Levin said that he was pleased with his choice and doesn’t mind at all not having a lead role in a show. He’s learning new stuff about the theater, acting, and the creative life.
That’s especially so in what will be his second class of the day, short film production. There, all the kids are creating a movie. Its premise is that they have been locked in a school for an entire two months with not an adult in sight.
Fun, of course, but Levin said he also was learning some of the differences between stage and film acting.
“With stage acting, the audience can see the whole space,” he said. “With the camera, you need to know more of the blocking.”
Wednesday he went with his group to the Yale University Art Gallery as part of the backstage class. Their mission was to see how the gallery hangs its paintings and how what’s on the walls relates to sculpture and free-standing three-dimensional art in the space. This is because Levin and the other students will be designing the gallery space at Co-Op, where the young painter campers will be showing their culminating works for the summer. Levin’s group will also be designing the posters and programs for the mainstage shows put on by the general arts campers and by the musical theater students. The latter would be Disney Jr’s The Little Mermaid for the first session and Alice in Wonderland for the next session..
Wuzzardo and Selena Malterra at the door to the black box theater.
Shubert Director of Education Kelly Wuzzardo endorses the kids, who want to be actors and learn the tech, design, management, and other sides of the theater business. Starting early at the camp is one of her themes.
“I always tell my kids that theater is collaborative and acting is a hard life,” she said.
If you try for an acting job and don’t get it, but know how to do lights, then you are in a much better position to have a life in the theater, she said. “You know tech, and you’ll eat better,” she added.
There are 80 kids enrolled in the two sessions, with 19 counselors, or teaching assistants. The latter are all paid, half by the city’s Youth at Work program and half by the Shubert. Nearly all the counselors, like Selena Malterra (pictured above), are Co-Op students. (Click here for the story about a counselor who went on get a job with the recent Matilda production at the Shubert.)
So far about ten kids who have been Shubert campers at Co-Op over the past seasons have grown up and, based in part on the camp experience, entered Co-Op as students — if they’re lucky enough to be selected for it in the lottery.
“It’s an incubator,” said Wuzzardo.
Levin hopes to be one of them. And despite the new worlds opening for him in film production and gallery design, he still wants to be a stage actor.
For more information about the camp and for registration, call 203 – 624-1825 or visit the camp’s website.