Thursday, September 30, 1932The Daily Tar Heel5
Performer f ound 'Fame 9 he was looking for
By KAREN ROSEN
Staff Writer
Ever wonder how those kids in Fame
got away with a party every day in the
school cafeteria? Were you jealous
because you never had a "Hot Lunch
Jam?" Actually, lunchtime was just a
form of detention hall, but Mel Johnson
Jr. wasn't complaining.
Johnson, who plays the roustabout Coe
in PRCs current production of Life on
the Mississippi, was senior class president
at the High School of the Performing Arts
in New York City.
"The school was in an old, dilapidated
building," Johnson said. "They could on
ly serve stone peanut butter sandwiches
and gooky soup, so they had to let us go
out to lunch. To get us back into the
building, they let us have a party every
day. Each month a different kid was the
DJ. You couldn't hear during lunch. It
was absolutely wonderful."
For his crack at fame, Johnson had to
go through the infamous auditions, and he
picked out two monologues to blow the
panel away. "Everybody picks the two
most dramatic things they can find,"
Johnson said. "Either you're in the
potter's field over a grave, or you have a
'brute force' piece where you're on your
deathbed. Every kid did a ripping-the-hair-out
scene."
Two senior students serve on the panel
which judges auditions and act with the
applicant in a scene as a part of the audi
tion. "They're handed three scenes as
they're waiting to go on," Johnson said.
"It can be between two boys, two girls, or
a girl and a guy. My entire time, no guy
ever picked a scene with the opposite sex.
They're junior-high students and don't
feel the security to work with a girl."
If they think that's tough, next comes
improvisation, when they have to talk
about why they want to be in the theatre.
If they just want to spice up their high
school years, they've come to the right
place. The High School of the Performing
Arts turns even such hum-drum activities
as fire drills into spectacles.
"We'd go out in the street and people
would say, 'What kind of a school is this?'
I used to come out dressed up like Winnie
the Pooh. Or we'd be dressed as bunnies
because we were doing animal impres
sions." Johnson said that the school was half
studio, half academic and all energy.
"You could not fail," he said. "But you
had to toe the line. After each semester,
you constantly had the pressure going.
With academics, there was always so
meone there to help. If you were expelled,
heaven help it wasn't for math. But if you
couldn't dance, you were gone."
In the case of the senior prom, the
school said the students couldn't dance.
But they ignored the decree. "Our prom
was hysterical," Johnson said. "The.
school canceled it, but we threw it anyway.
I said, 'I'm going to have one.' There was
no theme, we just did the prom. We had it
on a Thursday night and the school said
we had to be in class the next day. So we
went to class in our prom clothes and
slept."
As president of that mutinous bunch,
Johnson was supposed to organize the
10-year reunion. He was three years late.
"We had a 13th-year reunion. The 10th
slipped by and the 15th was too far away."
Of his classmates who didn't go into the
theatre, some became doctors, assistant
DA's, or started their own businesses.
They have one thing in common: high
visibility,
Johnson is probably the most visible of
them all. He was featured in two Broad
way musicals, On the Twentieth Century
and Eubie!, and earned rave reviews for
the latter. He has also appeared in several
off-Broadway shows and even farther
from the Great White Way in regional
theaters all over the nation. For the soap
opera addict, Johnson is a familiar face on
The Guiding Light, One Life to Live and
All My Children.
That's not to mention his numerous
television commercials.
It looks like Mel Johnson Jr. got what
everyone goes to the High School of the
Performing Arts for. Fame.
V, J in this a
these advertised items is required to be readily available for sale
e advertised price m each AAP Store, except as specifically noted
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Photo courtesy of Haymakers Repertory Company
Mel Johnson Jr; explains things to co-star John Daggan
... a scene from new PRC show 'Life on the Mississippi'
The Bottom Line takes a lighter look at the
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