Staff

 

John Sullivan  – Director

 Mr. John Sullivan has been an art teacher at Barnstable High School for the last 28 years. His primary subject area is Art and Cartooning, but he has also taught Ceramics, Arts & Crafts, Sculpture, Drawing and Illustration, Fine Arts 1, and Stagecraft.

 Though tens of thousands of people have seen his work with the Drama Club and Art Department, Sullivan likes to remain  “behind the curtain” and let the talents of his students speak for him.

 Mr. Sullivan started with the Drama Club in 1977 as Assistant Drama Coach to James Ruberti. In 1979 Ruberti stepped down after 16 years as Drama Coach to concentrate more on his Dean of Students job and Sullivan stepped in. Taking his cue from Ruberti, Sullivan mounted large-scale, large-cast musicals and used a Ruberti trick of double-casting the leads to allow more students to participate.

 In 1977 Sullivan started the first Haunted House on Cape Cod as a fund-raiser to help defray the cost of productions; it has proved to be popular that it continues to this day. In 1982 and again in 1986 Sullivan worked with the Barnstable selectmen to produce a Halloween Parade down Main Street. Soon Sullivan and the Drama Club were working with the town to produce other large-scale events. For the Cape’s First Night Celebration, Sullivan and his students built a 16-foot-tall, 100-foot-long dragon that marched down Main Street to kick off the First Night activities. He also designed dinosaur exhibits that were held at the Cape Cod Mall and seen by over 100 thousand people. Sullivan won national awards for his work on them. This year the collaboration continues with the BSFT offering outdoor theater at Aselton Park on the waterfront.

 Over the years many alumni of Sullivan’s classes and theatrical productions have gone on to earn great success in the entertainment field. Former members of the BSFT have won leads in popular television shows, written and illustrated children’s books, directed plays on and off Broadway, snagged leads in major motion pictures, designed the Nickelodeon logo, worked at Dreamworks, Imax, and Warner Brothers Studios, produced the opening ceremonies for the Olympics, worked backstage at the Oscars, and even won Emmys. Sullivan helped design two of the three auditoriums in the Barnstable system, the Tynan Auditorium and the 1440-seat Barnstable High School Performing Arts Center, the largest high school auditorium in New England.

 In 2004 Sullivan was inducted into the National Teachers Hall of Fame in Emporia, Kansas. That honor led to three meetings in Washington with the Department of Education to discuss the No Child Left Behind Act. Sullivan has always been an advocate of education and of improvements in the facilities in which they learn.

 From 1992-93, Sullivan left teaching for two years to pursue his love of animation. In 1992 he studied in the Animation Department of the Disney-funded California Institute for the Arts; in 1993 he worked on Turner Feature Animation’s first production, The Pagemaster. Realizing he liked teaching better after his stint in California, Sullivan returned to the classroom. In his spare time Sullivan has written nine plays and musicals for the Drama Club and the Summer Family Theater, four screenplays, has contributed to The Stage and The School text and teacher workbook, has designed and animated web-pages for the Disney Studio, drawn two coloring books, written and illustrated four children’s books for Hershey Park and constructed award-winning gardens and koi ponds in his backyard. He continues to work as a teacher and Drama Coach at Barnstable High School.

 It is clear that John Sullivan has left his mark on his students. As former student S. Andrew Rapo said in his letter to the Hall of Fame Committee: “John Sullivan is the type of teacher every student should have, and that every teacher should aspire to be.”

Ed O’Toole – Assistant Director/ Director

 Ed O’Toole has been teaching for 28 years, the last 21 as a member of the Barnstable High School English Department. During those 21 years he has taught nearly 20 different courses in addition to serving 4 years as the coach of the Speech Team and 15 as the yearbook teacher and advisor.

 In 1989 he inherited the senior English elective in Shakespeare after the retirement of Alice Williams, whose love for the playwright she called “Bill” is legendary. Since then, he has done his best to continue and add to that tradition by directing an annual Shakespeare production every year since 1999.

 It was in 1999 that BHS Drama Coach John Sullivan, who had always wanted to add Shakespeare to the Drama Club’s repertoire, asked O’Toole if he’d be interested in directing As You Like It.  Despite having directed only one play before – a middle-school musical – O’Toole agreed, and a professional and personal friendship was born.

 The casts of the Shakespeare productions have always featured members of the Drama Club, but almost every year, several of the key roles have been played by students from O’Toole’s classes, most of whom have never been onstage before. O’Toole attributes this to the performance-based approach this classes take to studying Shakespeare: the students enact the plays in class, which helps them overcome any trepidations they may have and serves as the best way to understand the words and the characters. 

 O’Toole’s Shakespeare plays also usually include elementary-age students as chorus members, yet another way to overcome what some have called “Shakesfear,” the feeling that only a college professor can follow a Shakespeare play and that no one but an actor born and educated in England can be in one. O’Toole’s belief that there’s something for everyone in Shakespeare’s plays was proved by this past May’s production of Twelfth Night, which in addition to its scheduled 3-night run, added 2 performances for nearly 500 7th-graders from the Barnstable Middle School. Those performances were so well received that the Drama Club’s Shakespeare play will likely become an annual event staged for the entire middle school and classroom study of the play incorporated into its English curriculum.