Please Get My CCNY Students to the Theater

Well, it's that time of the year again for me to plead with you for some legal tender, better known as cash. This might be for the last time because I am planning to retire after two decades, so let’s go out with a bang.

This fall semester at The City College of New York, two of my courses — "The Arts in New York City" (a Macaulay Honors Seminar) and "LGBTQI Film and Theatre"— with a total of 37 students, will not have the financial luxury of attending any professional live theatre unless you donate some of your hard-earned Almighty Dollars. Funding has been severely cut for the former course and is nonexistent for the latter.

For these students, which include those from a dozen countries (e.g. Trinidad, China, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Ohio), many of whom have never attended a professional theatrical performance in their lives, I am asking you to contribute what you can to enlarge their cultural horizons. (Even a $1 contribution would be helpful.)

Let's get these young folks to at least one Broadway production, one off-Broadway show, an opera, and a dance concert.

The photo you see attached is how my Arts in New York City class (Fall 2022) appeared after viewing Rigoletto at the Met, Kinky Boots, Phantom of the Opera, a dance concert at the Joyce Theatre, and after touring the Chelsea art galleries. And that was just for starters.

I would like my current students to start on a similar journey. When you open the cultural door for one generation, you open the door for the many that follow.

In the past, through your kindness, plus with the aid of such grand playwrights as Harvey Fierstein and Jeremy O.Harris, and that of some producers—— my classes saw "Slave Play," "Inheritance, Part 1," and "The Wrong Man." Another class not only attended "Torch Song Trilogy," but had an amazing Q-and-A with Mr. Fierstein and the entire cast, including Michael Urie.

Please be aware that CCNY, which has the most ethnically diverse campus in the United States, has an expanded on-campus Food Pantry for students in need of daily meals. Also, one young woman in a former class of mine could not afford a $6.00 fee to see an on-campus department musical.)

With funds for the arts being cut more and more, you can help remedy the situation a bit. If you can only spare a few dollars, these 37 City College students can experience the magic of professional theater and connect to their humanity and ours because as Oscar Wilde noted: “I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.”

Please donate. Thank you so much.

(By the way, Mr. Fierstein’s bestselling autobiography "I Was Better Last Night" is a hilarious must-read. You might also check out the work of another of our continual supporters, Stephen Silverman, whose many acclaimed books include the superb "Sondheim: His Life, His Shows, His Legacy.")