So I've been thinking about this more, and really this is just a litany of complaints about working in secondary education, so if this sounds boring and potentially damaging to your equilibrium, then read no further.
I was teaching in a school district in the East Bay, in a large city just south of where the Raiders live, at a high school that had rampant discipline problems, every year failed to make adequate test progress, and has an ineffective principal and a librarian who made the bulk of personnel decisions. Why, I don't know - evidently it has been this way for a while, and I was only there for two years. There was this immense pressure from certain influential members in the community to do nothing but musicals, oddly enough just like when I taught in Hollister for one year at their high school. And, oddly enough, in both cities the groups pressing for musicals were dominated by members of a certain quasi-Christian cult, the same cabal that a certain Republican presidential candidate associates with. Lets just call them Mermen, a "religion" that, in itself, eschews dancing, music, alcohol, smoking, anything that may be deemed to be part of the Devil's workshop. So what, you might ask, as I did, does a group that denigrates music and dancing have to do with pushing musical theatre down the audience's throat? The leading member of the pro-musical cabal in that city south of the East Bay's largest city was pushing for a Musical Academy. Let me digress by explaining - the high school had a couple of academies - Social Justice, Media Arts - to give students an opportunity to specialize, and have all of their general education classes in that academy rather than mixing in with the general student population. I had let it be known that I thought that a musical academy was not a great idea - I think I equated it to trying to have a balanced diet by eating only white bread, marzipan and drinking just cream soda. And I related a similar situation, when I was at UCLA, where a prominent Hollywood and musical theatre star had passed away, and left a good chunk ( a couple million) of his estate as an endowment to the UCLA School of Theatre to be used only to start a musical theatre program. And there was an immense amount of hand wringing on whether to accept the money, as the faculty was havinga difficult time coming up with a program rigorous enough to be accredited, and approved by the UC. Eventually they did. But that was my concern at this high school.
Now, to get back to why the Mermen like musicals, and want to swamp high school theatre programs with it. Because really, they don't like theatre, or they don't trust it, and want theatre programs they can control, content that is non-threatening - hence musicals. And it is part and parcel of the whole school district's emphasis on traditional, Euro-centric curriculum. The approved reading list for English looks like it was drawn up in the early 50s. You could go through high school and read nothing but Dickens. Its all part and parcel of high school, and the struggle to control curriculum, and theatre is seen as being nothing more that the production of harmless pablum. The problem is that for students who are interested in theatre, or acting and directing, that such a programs does little to nothing to prepare them for undergraduate theatre, or professional theater, unless they just want to do musicals. Which would be like wanting to become a lawyer, but only if you could handle lawsuits only involving ice cream trucks.
More later ... time to eat
