School portraits / A schoolboy memory and a Broadway reunion
The Little Old Man With the Ear Trumpet
A St. Bernard's teacher told his eighth-grade actors to play to an imaginary listener in the back of the balcony. Twelve years later he came to his student's Broadway show to check.
John Rubinstein, the actor, graduated from St. Bernard's School in Manhattan in 1960, when it ended at eighth grade. In a recollection for the school, he wrote that by thirteen he knew beyond doubt he would be an actor. He played Maid Marian in fourth grade, Peter Pan in fifth, a Spirit in The Tempest in sixth, and Macbeth in eighth.
The Shakespeare plays were directed by Edward Musgrove Strange, born in London in 1898, who also played the pump organ for assemblies and taught seventh-grade math, geography and English. He made his boys tea upstairs, where he lived, and played them Flanders and Swann. Parts were cast on the last day of school and learned over the summer. In the fall he taught them to project, with a rule that Rubinstein still quotes:
"There's a little old man with an ear-trumpet in the back row of the balcony. He must hear – and understand – every single word!"
Every school play I have attended, I have been the little old man in the back row. I have never understood every single word. Once, at the eldest's third-grade play, I understood none of them, and she was the narrator.
Twelve years after he graduated, Rubinstein appeared in his first Broadway show. Strange, retired by then, came to see it. At dinner afterward, Rubinstein writes, his old teacher said quite bluntly that he had not been impressed by the play, which was the musical Pippin. But he was proud that he had heard and understood every word his former student spoke and sang, in the days before actors wore microphones, and he took the credit.
He did not like the show. He liked the diction. That is a teacher.
St. Bernard's still has an eighth-grade Shakespeare play, every year since 1910. It also has a small stuffed alligator. Every Friday at assembly, one class hands it, with fanfare, to another, and in this way the alligator travels each week to the neatest classroom in the school.
I would like the alligator at our house. The middle one's room would never see it. The youngest's room would get it once, in a week when she was at her grandmother's.
The youngest's school play is next month. She has one line. We have been practicing in the kitchen with me standing in the hall. I told her there is a little old man with an ear trumpet at the back. She asked if he was me. I said yes. She said, then he should sit closer.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- John Rubinstein ’60 — St. Bernard’s School stbernards.org
- St. Bernard’s: Signature Programs stbernards.org
- St. Bernard’s: The Arts stbernards.org
- St. Bernard’s public parent and student reviews niche.com