MichiganRadio

Singing for Your Supper Art Supplies ANN ARBOR, MI (Michigan Radio) - Michigan schools saw their state funding cut last year by $165 per student. Next year could be even worse if the deficit continues to grow. Arts programs are often some of the first to get cut when funding is down. So what's a district to do? One option is to put on a musical.

Mike Mosallam has the herculean task of trying to get 100 1st - 5th graders to sit still and wait for him to call them to the stage.

"If I could have all of the 1st graders on stage, in their positions in the back, please," shouts Mosallam, as he directs a production of Guys and Dolls.

There are no Broadway stars in the show. No one from the cast of High School Musical. Just a bunch of adults and kids who live in Ann Arbor's Burns Park School District.

They call themselves the Burns Park Players. Adults play the leads, kids are in the chorus, and nearly all 300 people in the cast and crew are volunteers.

The group was a lot smaller when they started 25 years ago. That's when a handful of parents got together to try to figure out a way to pay for their 6th graders camping trip:

"It was like a Judy Garland movie," says Kathy Koehler, a member of the Players. "It was like, let's raise money by doing a musical! And they put on Grease and did it in the Burns Park school auditorium, which is tiny. And, you know, it was really conceived as a one shot deal."

But Burns Park Player Kathy Koehler says the original group had so much fun that they decided to put on a musical every year. Now, instead of raising money for camping trips, the money goes toward performing arts programs in the Ann Arbor Public School District. They've turned themselves into a non-profit, and to date, they've raised over $230,000 through ticket sales and membership dues.

"We support 1 program that's in all the middle schools now where kids not able to afford private music lessons on their own, we pay for them to have music lessons in the school. We give theater scholarships to elementary kids. We also give money to the Ann Arbor educational foundation, so they spread it out among the schools."

George List is only in 3rd grade, but the fundraising aspect of the production isn't lost on him:

"It makes me feel kind of proud because I know I'm helping the school do nice stuff with the kids."

Some 5th graders chime in as well, saying it feels awesome, like they're doing something useful.

Of course it also helps that they get to ham it up on stage in one of the most popular Broadway songs of all time, Sit Down Your Rocking the Boat.

For Susan Hutton, whose daughter is in the play, the whole community aspect of the show is just as important to her as the fundraising part:

"People that I never knew, I now know and see them at the grocery store or the post office and it's all because of this production."

And, she says, any neighborhood can replicate it. Now, granted Burns Park is a very affluent part of Ann Arbor. And to put on a show at this scale, it takes a ton of patience, people with resources, and a lot of time. The cast of Guys and Dolls rehearses for 6 weeks before the curtain goes up, not to mention the endless hours of sewing costumes, and building and painting sets.

But group member Kathy Koehler says it's all worth it, whether it's a play with a cast of 20 or 200.

"To me it becomes ever more important that we continue our support of these programs because they are being cut right and left. So projects like this, run by parents outside the school, but to support the schools, I think that's going to become more important if we want to see the level of music and arts that we're lucky enough to have in our public schools."

And as one cast member who also happens to be a realtor told me, people have bought homes in Burns Park specifically so they could be part of the Burns Park Players.

So in addition to raising money, a community theater could also be a good real estate investment.

Contact Jennifer Guerra at guerraj@umich.edu

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