Charlotte Central School taking strides to stage upgrade

It’s curtains for the curtain on the stage in Charlotte Central School’s multipurpose room. The school and its PTO hope that’s just the beginning.

Just before the school’s variety show at the end of March, the school and PTO announced a fundraising effort to upgrade the curtain and other stage equipment like sound and lights.

Actually, “upgrade” is probably not the correct term for the sound system because the stage doesn’t have a sound system now, although principal Tim O’Leary is hopeful the school might have both a new sound and new lighting system before the beginning of next school year.

His optimism is fueled by the extremely encouraging start to a $50,000-fundraising effort. By the time of the variety show, the effort, that just started days prior, had raised half of its goal.

The PTO committed $10,000 from its funds, and O’Leary committed school discretionary funds to cover the rest of the $14,350 cost for a new curtain and its installation.

After the variety show, John Canning, president and co-founder of PCC (Physician’s Computer Company), a software company focused on pediatric medicine, wrote a check for $12,000 to the campaign and pledged another $10,000 in matching funds from his company.

Canning said his company supports theater because when he was a kid he did theater, both as an actor and on the tech side. Sometimes the performances he was involved with might have 30 people in the audience, but sometimes the shows would be sold out. He learned the importance of getting people into seats and always said, “When I get older, I’ll make sure I support local theater, and I try to do that as much as I can.”

Although PCC is in Winooski and Canning is from South Burlington, he said he is good friends with some Charlotte Central School families and has been aware, since before the pandemic, that the school’s multipurpose room needed some significant upgrades to its stage.

“It’s now come together with a principal who understands it and has been able to move it forward,” Canning said. “My company works with pediatricians, so we like to support programs that create opportunities for kids.”

Last year, PCC gave close to a million dollars to different community projects around the state.

One of the Charlotte Central School families that Canning is friends with is the family of Oscar Williams, who graduated from the school. Williams played Christian Bechdel in “Fun Home,” when the musical adaptation of Vermonter Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir opened on Broadway in 2015.

Zoe Williams, the mother of Oscar, has six children, three of whom are currently students at Charlotte Central School. As an active theater family, they are happy to see the prospect of improvements to the school’s stage.

As fate would have it, when she talked to this reporter by phone, she was standing in line with some of her children to see a Very Merry Theatre production of “Tarzan Jr.”

Zoe Williams said that Oscar’s first stage experience was in second grade in the school’s variety show. That experience ignited a passion in him for performing. He began making the circuit of theatrical opportunities for young people in this area — Very Merry Theatre, the Flynn youth theatre program before it was discontinued, Lyric Theatre and Middlebury Community Players.

Now, he is getting ready to graduate from Pace University in New York.

After his disappointment at not getting called back for the lead in a Lyric Theatre production of “Oliver,” Zoe Williams relayed a story from another cast member’s mother, whose daughter had been auditioning for “Matilda” on Broadway.

The mother told Zoe to tell her son, “Disappointment is part of theater.”

That message was lost on Oscar. “All he heard was: ‘Oh, I can live in Vermont and audition for Broadway,’” Zoe Williams said.

He insisted that his parents take him to New York for Broadway auditions. He was 9. A year and a half later, he was cast in “Fun Home.”

After two years in “Fun Home” on the Great White Way, Oscar Williams returned to Charlotte Central School. After his return, he was cast in a big role in the spring musical, “The Music Man,” in eighth grade.

During his time in New York, Zoe said her son took advantage of the opportunity to soak up the theatre scene there. He saw “everything” on Broadway and really became a part of the theatre community. Oscar became good enough friends with Lin-Manuel Miranda that his phone voicemail is Miranda rapping about Zoe’s son.

“There used to be a lot more youth theater opportunities in this area. We’ve lost a couple of groups. That makes youth theater at the schools a lot more important, and our facilities at Charlotte have not been up to par with a lot of other schools,” Zoe Williams said. “I think that if we have the right equipment and a good place to watch, we’ll be able to put on better shows, which will draw more kids to participating and participating earlier.”

This will lead to more parent involvement, more audience, more tickets sales and more donations which will help fund the program, she said.

Besides being an asset to the variety show and other school thespian endeavors, upgrading the sound and lighting would make the learning space so much more dynamic, O’Leary said.

Monthly school meetings happen in front of the stage, instead of on the stage, because the lighting is so bad, he said. When the school does productions, sound and lighting equipment must be borrowed or rented.

O’Leary has visions of using the stage for a variety of things, like having a space where a fifth and sixth grade humanities class could present poems they have written.

He imagines opportunities to invite more people into the school building and strengthen bridges between the community and the school.

“Having a well-functioning theater down the road is something that I hope can be used by different groups in the community,” O’Leary said. “Could it be a place a community theater group running summer camps might use?”