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Compass Rose – Going Pro!
Not long before Carrie Underwood traipsed across the Alps in NBC’s live broadcast of The Sound of Music, the artists at Compass Rose mounted a production in their intimate, black-box space in Annapolis, Maryland. Instead of painted murals and a pre-recorded orchestra, they had a single wooden bench, a concert grand, and an empty space ready to be transformed – by the imagination of actors and audience – into mountains, convents, and villas.
“It really did become about the sound of music,” explained Founder and Artistic Director Lucinda Merry-Browne. “We had a cast that was vocally talented. We had great choreography and costumes. The entire focus was on the performance.” In keeping with the theatre’s mission, The Sound of Music paired students with professionals. “We are rooted in education,” Merry-Browne says. “but we’re not teaching our students about theatre, we’re giving them the chance to actually do it.”
The company offers classes for students age 3 to 90, and casts them in its professional productions whenever possible. “From day one, they are fully integrated cast members,” Merry-Browne explains, “and they’re compensated as such.” Student actors are paired with a mentor who helps them navigate the profession’s high expectations.
Will Fritz, 14, recognizes the program’s real-world benefits. “Being in a professional show with Compass Rose has taught me great time-management skills,” he says, “and those skills have stuck with me since. Compass Rose has also immensely improved my public speaking skills. Learning to project my voice and enunciate my words has helped me greatly at school.”
In addition to an eclectic season of musicals and dramas, the company meets the needs of local schools through its extensive outreach programs, including the Shakespeare-based Beyond the Bard. A festival of new work, featuring plays by students and professionals, recently coincided with the run of Lee Blessing’s Eleemosynary, and culminated in a keynote address by Blessing himself. Central to that festival was the Young Actors Studio, a company of teens who apprentice professional productions, and annually produce a play geared for young audiences.
Eli Pendry, a Compass Rose veteran at 17, knows first-hand the value of a life in the theatre. “You get to play another person,” he says. “You get to feel feelings you may never have felt, you get to see things from a different perspective, you get to ‘live life’ in a different time period or setting.”
He’s also learned some tough lessons. “The longer that I‘ve been an actor,” Pendry says, “the better I’ve been able to deal with rejection. I’ve learned that that’s the way it is when you’re an actor, so I better get used to it.” Rubbing elbows with professionals from DC, Baltimore, and New York, has been an eye-opener. “Talking to the actors and directors has made me want to go to college to study theater,” he admits. “That is pretty significant since I’d been thinking that I would just move to NYC and audition a lot.”
Fritz, too, seems transformed by his experience. “The most important thing that I’ve learned in my four years with Compass Rose,” he says, “is that no matter how much you’re pushed, no matter how difficult the show is, no matter how much pressure you put on yourself, it is all worth it. To work together with some of the greatest people you’ll ever meet, to laugh and have fun with everyone and to put on an amazing show for great people—Compass Rose has given me so much.”
Playwright and educator Norman Allen received the Charles MacArthur Award for In The Garden, and is a member of Playwrights' Arena at Arena Stage. His work has been produced across the U.S., Europe, and Asia.
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