As Seen in Journal
|
 E-mail Story Print Friendly Send E-mailTo Joline Gutierrez Krueger BY Recent stories by Joline Gutierrez Krueger $$ NewsLibrary Archives search for Joline Gutierrez Krueger '95-now  Reprint story
Paperboy text upfront |
Play Puzzles and Free Games
Speakup and View Comments Front Page 
paperboy text upfront
Monday, December 21, 2009
True Pageantry
By Joline Gutierrez Krueger
Journal Staff Writer
In 1998, St. Charles Borromeo School Principal B.J. Rossow-Deming had an idea to put on a little Christmas show.
Well, maybe not so little. Rossow-Deming isn't one for little. Or limiting. Her motto: What is impossible today may be the norm tomorrow.
The retired Army lieutenant colonel and onetime worldly wanderer had that moment of theatrical brilliance then when she arrived at St. Charles, a crumbling Catholic school in nearly every sense.
It was part of her mission to revitalize the Albuquerque school's tottering arts programs.
"I've traveled the world and I appreciate all the theater and music and art I've been privileged to witness," she said. "There's no reason why the children of Albuquerque can't appreciate that, too."
That first Christmas, she asked the music and art teachers — both hired at full-time status — to come up with a show that involved every student from kindergarten to eighth grade and had more pizazz than the predictable angel-and-shepherd skit that only a parent could love.
"I told them to run with it," she said.
The teachers and their students delivered, performing an ambitious "Glee"-meets-vacation Bible school musical that drew a larger audience than the school's gymnasium could handle.
For the next couple of Christmases, they held the show in an auditorium at the nearby Central New Mexico Community College. That, too, proved too small to accommodate a community eager to see what kind of show the kids would put on next.
"So, I said let's go to the Kiva," she recalled, as if it was not presumptuous to assume that a school show could pack a venue where the likes of George Jones and the Jonas Brothers have performed.
The Kiva Auditorium, in the Albuquerque Convention Center, seats a little more than 2,000, and every year the St. Charles show fills most of the seats, Rossow-Deming said.
"The show isn't open to the general public. We don't advertise," she said. "But the excitement builds as we get close to the performance date. You can feel it. It's not just the parents who come, who want to come, but it's the grandparents, the aunts and uncles and anybody connected in some way to a student. It's our school community. It's all word-of-mouth."
The success of the Christmas show has done much more than offer a night of Christmas cheer. It has become the thing that sets St. Charles apart from the rest by bringing its community together.
"We've gone from being one of the crummiest schools to one of the best, and we've done it as a community," Rossow-Deming said.
Last Thursday, the St. Charles kids took the stage once more for their annual Christmas Spectacular at the Kiva, selling about 1,500 tickets at $5 and $10 apiece.
Not bad for a school with 275 students.
And not a bad show.
Everybody remembered their lines, remembered the lyrics, their positions on stage. Music and drama teacher Ninette Mordaunt, herself an actress in local theater, kept the show moving with the crispness and the verve she had instilled in each child since the beginning of the school year.
They were stars.
This year's production featured "The Night Before Christmas Caper," performed by the kindergartners and grade school students with all the joy and rosy-cheeked earnestness of a "High School Musical" movie.
The plot centers on an intrepid and musically inclined detective investigating the mystery of Christmas by tracking down "cowboy" shepherds and three break-dancing kings.
The middle school students' portion of the program took an altogether different tone by transforming the Christmas story of Jesus' birth into an Indonesian shadow play replete with life-size paper puppets and the exotic clanging and chiming of traditional gamelan music performed by the students.
"They pretty much produced the whole thing," art teacher Donna Gallegos said. "The puppets were entirely their idea, they had input on the script."
Performing in the show has become not only a holiday tradition at the school but a tool that helps build confidence in each child and, in some cases, improve in other areas of education — which is exactly what Rossow-Deming had in mind.
"You hold kids to high expectations, and pretty soon they expect great things from themselves —what seems impossible is now the norm," she said. "And gosh, is that fun to watch."
That's got to be the greatest show there is.
UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. You can reach Joline at 823-3603, jkrueger@abqjournal.com or follow her on Twitter @jolinegkg.
| We do not publish all comments, and we do not publish comments immediately. |
|
|
