Photos by Jackie Merrill and Joon Lee
Three mute, blue-painted hooligans rush the stage in hot pursuit of a familiar class clown. But these are not high school delinquents—or at least, not delinquent students. The three blue men are performing arts teachers. Their target? Associate Dean Anthony Meyer.
Artistic expression requires a lack of self-consciousness, a readiness to give oneself over completely to the audience—the kind of vulnerability that might seem alien in our authority figures. Yet at Moonlighting, the 13th annual teacher talent show, the performers showed no hesitation, and for that they gained, rather than lost, our respect.
The show began with a short mini-movie produced by Performing Arts teacher Krissie Jankowski, featuring Meyer as a James Bond-type character who assists our new headmaster, Deborah Holman, along her treacherous journey to the school. The film ended with Holman parachuting out of a plane into the quad, which she described as “not in the job description,” and set the tone for the rest of the evening with its zany, irreverent spirit.
Of the nine remaining performances, five were musical, giving music teachers in particular the spotlight usually reserved for their students. Band teacher Carolyn Castellano led a band of teachers from various departments in a performance that channeled the anti-authoritarian spirit of Alanis Morisette, while chorus teacher Anat Hochberg took Roberts-Dubbs to Broadway with her performance of the Rodgers and Hart show tune “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered.”
But the most exuberant musical performance of the night had to be the faculty rendition of “Call Me Maybe,” Carly Rae Jepsen’s upbeat summer hit. The performance marked Holman’s first in-person appearance of the night, bringing she and the other teachers into the distinguished company of such viral “Call Me Maybe” crooners as the Harvard baseball team.
The dance performances of the night also drew inspiration from sources both old and new. Performing Arts Curriculum Coordinator Lynn Modell, Boston University dance instructor Ann Brown and Director of BU’s dance program Micki Taylor-Pinney bewildered the audience with bizarre, robot-like moves in sync to electronic music more often suited to an underground club than the familiar halls of the school. World Language teacher Andrew Kimball and ELL teacher Katya Babitskaya preferred to evoke a bygone era of technology—the silent film—with a dance performance inspired by the Oscar award-winning film The Artist, while World Language teacher Cori Green, Associate Dean Diane Lande and Assistant Headmaster Hal Mason brought the audience back to modernity with a Wii Game-inspired dance set to Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance.”
The only theater performance of the night was by far the crowd favorite. “Light Blue Man Group,” performed by Castellano and drama teachers Mary Mastandrea and Summer Williams, took both stage and audience by storm with a performance both interactive and bizarre. The three blue ‘men,’ modeled on the Blue Performance Trio, eventually brought their pantomime antics to the audience, choosing three random people from the crowd. The three audience members, to their surprise and confusion, were removed from the auditorium. Meyer took the stage to make the transition to the next act, and the “Light Blue Man Group” appeared to have left without explanation—that is, until the moment, between Meyer’s off-the-cuff jokes and schmoozing with the crowd, the blue men ran and the three audience participants rejoined the stage and resumed their performance.
With a fun and light-hearted tone, the show won laughter and approval from members at all corners of the auditorium. The only ‘lesson’ taught here was that our teachers are maybe a little more fun than we might think.
