All Aboard the S.S. American
Durango High sets sail with ‘Anything Goes!’

Tom Keyser and Jill Langonie, Durango High School musical directors, take a break on the set of "Anything Goes" last week. The musical production opens this Friday./Photo by David Halterman

by Judith Reynolds

It’s burned into their musical memories. Tom Kyser and Jill Langoni, Durango High School musical directors, say they will never forget the school’s first production of “Anything Goes!” It took place some 19 years ago, but it could have been yesterday.

“During one performance,” Kyser said in an interview last week at the high school, “we had a major mess up. One of the leads suddenly skipped a lot of material, and neither he nor the chorus realized it.”

Conductor Kyser said he looked at his accompanist, Langoni, and she seemed to know what to do. She kept playing the base line with her left hand but stopped playing the melody. Discreetly, he signaled the pit orchestra to stop playing entirely. “But I kept conducting,” he said, not wanting the audience to know something major had happened.

While air conducting, Langoni said, “Tom flipped pages back and forth, trying to find where the lead was in the music. We all just kept moving along, and finally Tom found the measure number where the lead was singing and somehow got the chorus and orchestra back on the same page. We had jumped four pages!”

“Most of the audience never knew what happened,” Kyser said with some relief. It was one of those musical nightmares every performer has probably had – better to have it in high school than on Broadway.

Then as now, Kyser is music director and conductor for every DHS musical. Then as now, Langoni is official accompanist and coach. Together they are two parts of a five-member creative team surrounding Director Mona Wood-Patterson.

“I’m so lucky,” Wood-Patterson said in a separate interview last week. “Here we are at this little high school, and we have so many qualified and committed people helping the students stage a big musical. Jill is a brilliant vocal coach. She loves teen-agers and can follow anyone at any tempo. She’s saved many a young actor.”

About Kyser, Wood-Patterson has only high praise: “For one thing, Tom hears everything. I may hear something and feel it’s not quite right. He’ll say, ‘Well, so-and-so is a quarter note sharp. And that singer is singing in the middle of a trio or a quartet. Tom is gifted at hearing the whole and the parts.”

Two other long-term team members are technical director and set designer Charles Ford and costumer JoAnn Nevils.

Ford also designed the set for the first “Anything Goes!” The 2008 version of the complex deck-and-below-deck set of the S.S. American is far more elaborate than the one done 19 years ago, Ford said.

“That was the first set I designed. Now I feel like I know what I’m doing. One thing that’s new is a double-decker, lower class cabin on one side of the stage and a first class state room on the other.” Spanning the broad central stage, the S.S. American sprawls out for all kinds of scenes and large dance numbers. Ford’s PVC pipe railings are painted to look like brass. Art Deco windows create an elegant façade for the captain’s quarters. And alert audience members may notice differences in porthole designs, cabin décor and lighting fixtures.

“We did some research,” Ford said, “and learned, for example, that each class accommodation on ocean liners in the ’30s had different size and shape portholes.” The goal was to create a period look on-board ship and among the passengers.

“Most of the costumes are vintage,” Wood-Patterson said, “largely from JoAnn’s collection, and some from mine. The rest are all hand built.”

The most recent member of the creative team, replacing long-term choreographer Patricia Ratliff, is Denise Hagemeister. She’s capitalizing on the fact that this 1934 musical is a dance show, “mostly tap,” Wood-Patterson said. “And the students love it. You can’t sit through a number with all these exuberant teen-age tap dancers without feeling the energy.”

And who doesn’t love Cole Porter tunes?

“It’s fun not to be doing something really serious and heady for a change,” Wood-Patterson said. “I try to rotate different types of musicals over a four-year period so the students experience different styles. For this group of students, we’ve done ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ ‘Grease,’ ‘Fiddler,’ and now ‘Anything Goes!’”

In this fluffy shipboard romance you’ll hear such familiar songs as “You’re the Top,” “DeLovely,” and “I Get a Kick out of You,” not to mention the title song.

The cast and technical crew, as per tradition, constitute a multitude. But this time around, instead of a full pit orchestra, Kyser will lead a nicely trimmed combo made up of Langoni on piano, Carol Thurman on keyboard, Steve Nogarede on percussion and Keith Shacklett on bass.

Kyser and Langoni said they don’t expect a rerun of that first performance glitch. And they won’t reveal which number caused everyone to be on high alert.

“A few weeks ago, though,” Kyser said, “we came to the same spot in rehearsal and there was a minor problem. Jill and I looked at each other, and just kept going.” •

 

 

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