Broadway star Jan Maxwell visits theater students

Arimeta Diop, Online Editor
September 21, 2014

Friday, Sept. 19, students were treated to a master class as well as Q & A session with five-time Tony Award nominee and two-time Drama Desk Award winner Jan Maxwell. The session lasted from period six through seven. Students were free to ask Maxwell questions on topics ranging anywhere from personal life to what her first years in New York were like for her as a young performer.

Senior Natalie Shea was able to directly work with Maxwell during the master class, performing both a vocal piece and monologue, as her peers looked on from the audience and took note of the criticisms and comments Maxwell gave to Shea. The Broadway veteran had Shea pick apart her vocal selection through speaking lyrics rather than singing them and then making the piece more personal and relatable to herself.

Maxwell had been an inductee into West Fargo High Hall of Fame the night before. Gary Clark, a member of the 2014 Nomination Committee for the Hall of Fame, was a teacher of Maxwell’s when she was a student at WFHS and had been attempting to get her in West Fargo to speak with students interested in the performing arts as a career.

“I’d been inviting her every year but her schedule wouldn’t allow it,” Clark said.

The Hall of Fame nomination then opened up this opportunity for students. Clark and Sheyenne High School drama director, Adam Pankow, both stated that it was only scheduling that had kept Maxwell from speaking to students before now. Both Pankow and Clark expressed that she had needed no actual convincing to speak to the students but simply a break in her schedule to make the trip to WFHS.

Maxwell gifted students with nuggets of advice and inspiration for them to grow on as performers first, but also as people. She emphasized that students should use being from West Fargo as an asset when they continue their career and not see it as a hindrance.

“You are you, and you are enough,” Maxwell said. “And if anyone says you aren’t then use that as a motivator.”