Support local art in your town

Tom Pinney

It was the second night of Maryville High School’s production of The Music Man, and I was positioned in the back section of the new performing arts center, middle of the house, armed with a monopod and a camera with a lens that looked like it should have been in the hands of a sports photographer.

And I was not a happy camper.

But my mood had nothing to do with what was happening on the stage. Chase Graves, Vanessa Klotz, and a cast of nearly 80 was delivering one of the finest performances I have ever seen on a high school stage.

And I went to a high school known throughout the area for our performing arts.

That’s why I was unhappy. In high school, I was in two shows which were each sold out two weeks before we even took the stage.

This show was better than both of those, by far, and yet there were empty seats. A lot of them.

Rewind about a week and a half, and find me sitting in the living room of the Union on campus, armed with the same camera – albeit, no monopod and a smaller lens – taking pictures of literary festival/poetry slam Emerging Expressions.

Another celebration of local art, another mass of empty seats.

Fast forward to this past weekend, the Rose Theater on Third, the Nodaway Community Theater Company preparing backstage to perform in front of five people. FIVE.

For a small town, Maryville has a surprising amount of local art to feature. And yet, our community is apathetic to what’s going around them.

Sure, we’re not Kansas City, Des Moines, Omaha, St. Joseph… but we are Maryville. And Maryville is pretty awesome.

Judging on what I’ve seen in only the three years and change I’ve lived here, Maryville has more talent per capita than any of those other places. Heck, Kansas City, Des Moines, and Omaha have to bring in traveling Broadway companies to keep their cities satiated, and yet we’re able to do it with local talent all the time.

Plus, we’re able to offer that art at a significantly lower price.

For instance: a ticket in the nosebleed section of a traveling Broadway show in Kansas City costs anywhere between $25 and $30. And that’s in the nosebleeds; if you want to be in the mezz, you’re looking at around $100, and ground seats are an arm and a leg.

But, if you have $8 burning a hole in your pocket, you could be sitting front row, center aisle of the Rose Theater this Friday or Saturday to see the NCTC put on their second slate of performances of Scrooge Macbeth, which is exactly as it sounds: take the complete works of Shakespeare, add a few Christmas carols and stories, toss in a grown man with a beard putting on a dress, and voila! Comedy.

Plus, that money goes toward helping NCTC’s operating costs, which allows them to put on multiple shows a year and give creative types an outlet for expression and a reason to stay here.

I don’t say this because I selfishly want you all to come see a show I’m in. (But, please, come see it, it’s a laugh riot and we’ve been working since late September to prepare a great show.)

I say this because, if we don’t support local art, we will lose it.

In May, Maryville High will graduate a senior class bursting at the seams with talent. Big names you’ve seen in this paper in stories about the speech team or the musical, plus some names which should be big who poured their blood, sweat, and tears into the Marching Spoofhounds and Spectrum, will potentially be leaving town and, in the words of a certain basketball-throwing prima donna, “taking their talents” elsewhere.

That’s a major hit where local talent is concerned.

But then there are others who come to Maryville and decide to share their talents with us, like the University students who work very hard on close to 10 shows a year. But the vast majority of University students are here only for as long as they’re in college, and the artistically-inclined ones all leave for bigger markets.

That’s not just conjecture, either.

There’s others still who chose to make Maryville their permanent residence for one reason or another, and they choose to share their talents whenever they get a chance.

You’ll find them at open mics, performance nights at The Pub (which carry no cover charge, by the way), or plugging themselves in somewhere they feel they can contribute.

But leave them high and dry and, eventually, they will leave this town for greener pastures. And one of the surest signs of a community’s downfall is if the arts leave it.

Again, this isn’t just conjecture.

Arts keep a community alive, they show that a community has talent and is worth not only visiting, but staying in. Because if an artist can make a living, then so can anyone.

So go out and support local artists do their thing whenever you can. You’re keeping them here, and in the meantime, keeping Maryville a nice place to be.