Spotlight on Performing Arts : Education: Dixie Canyon students put on five Broadway-style plays each year. The program’s supporting players include parents who are show-biz professionals.

If, 20 years from now, an Academy Award winner takes the stage and gushes that she owes it all to Dixie, residents of Sherman Oaks will surely know why.

Dixie Canyon Elementary School has a performing arts program that stands out so much among grade schools in the San Fernando Valley that parents move to Sherman Oaks just to enroll their children at the school.

“We looked for a house in this neighborhood specifically so my kids could be in this program,” says Debby Hellman of Sherman Oaks. Ditto other parents with children in the school.

What’s so special about Dixie?

Each school year, Dixie presents five theater productions with all the trappings of Broadway--an array of costumes, elaborate sets, music that’s sometimes live, vivid sound effects and spotlights. All of this would be impossible without the support of parents, some of them established film, theater and dance professionals in their late 30s and early 40s who operate Dixie’s celebrated performing arts program.

“The three Rs (reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic) don’t prepare you for life--jobs, relationships, dating,” says parent Dan Baran. “Here kids have a chance to work in a realistic situation that gives them confidence, develops teamwork and cooperation. This is the gang they ought to belong to.”

The gang puts on full-scale productions, including “Willy Wonka,” “Peter Pan” and “Grease,” involving 140 students who do everything from acting and singing to operating the sound and lights, and as many as 20 dedicated parents, who direct the productions, build sets, make costumes, print playbills and hold a bake sale to raise money for the performing arts program.

“My children are excited about it. To me, that’s important,” says Steve Callas, construction coordinator for “Terminator 2,” who often lends a hand building set props for Dixie productions. His wife, Tina, was set and production coordinator for the October show, “Gilligan: The Dixie Episode.”

For “Gilligan,” the stage in the school’s auditorium was adorned with a hut, three-dimensional 10-foot-tall palm trees and cutouts of boats. Students were dressed as Gilligan, the Skipper and passengers of the Minnow, as natives and as such underwater creatures as lobsters and mermaids.

The show’s writer, director and choreographer was Sue Robinson, a mother of a Dixie student and an aerobics teacher and fashion show producer for Nike. George Wyle, a friend of Robinson’s who wrote the music and lyrics for the “Gilligan’s Island” TV series years ago, composed 17 original songs for the musical and provided piano accompaniment for the singers.

Each Dixie production takes parents months to prepare. Those who want to produce a show contact Robinson, director of Dixie’s performing arts program. She selects four directors, taking on one play herself, and assigns classes to each production in such a way that each Dixie student gets to appear in one play a year.

The cost of a production ($500 stipend for the director and $175 for costumes and expenses) is borne by the school’s booster club, which raises money through bake sales and other activities to finance the plays and pay Robinson a small stipend for running the performing arts program.

Dixie’s performing arts program was launched during the 1980-81 school year by television producer Judy Conway Greening, who did it because “busing was causing a lot of pain. This was a way to heal. I realized theater was something all these kids should have access to.”

Working with the principal, Greening took time off from producing syndicated shows like “Insight,” a series of dramatic anthologies she worked on for 20 years, to introduce drama to Dixie.

“I remember one morning an actor-technician for ‘Hill Street Blues’ pulled up in a truck and unloaded a huge papier-mache Halloween prop they had used in a parade in one of the episodes,” Greening recalls. “Parents were always thinking of Dixie.”

Even though her children have long since graduated from Dixie, Greening is so attached to the school she still helps out with the performing arts program.

“I like these plays a lot,” fifth-grader Kevin Lelles says. “It’s a chance to express myself.”

“I get a sensation out of acting, just standing in front of an audience,” says Alexandra Le Tellier, who is in the sixth grade. “I like the songs, the acting, the dancing.”

But parent Barbara Mallory-Schwartz says: “We’re not doing this to make child actors. We’re doing it because kids need academics and aesthetics.” Mallory-Schwartz, a children’s theater producer, last year directed the Dixie production of “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” and her husband, Lloyd Schwartz, writer-producer of “The Brady Bunch” reunion films and series, wrote the script.

Wyle, 76, whose son attended Dixie 41 years ago but who has no other connection to the school, got involved through a parent three years ago and stayed on as a volunteer, enthusiastically teaching music to the school’s extracurricular glee club and working with Robinson on one original stage production a year.

“What keeps me young is this group,” he said gesturing toward the students at a recent “Gilligan” rehearsal. Suddenly, he walked to the piano and and started playing “Do Re Mi” from “The Sound of Music.” Within seconds, students throughout the auditorium broke into song and started gathering around the piano.

Rehearsals for each of the school’s five yearly productions take four weeks. During the first three, students who are in the play are pulled out of class for a little more than an hour every afternoon. The week before a performance, students rehearse about three hours a day.

Despite the fact that their class schedules often become chaotic during rehearsals, teachers applaud the performing arts program.

“It improves students’ oral language, cooperative learning where they have to work together and get along, choral abilities and memorization,” says Jill Winner, who teaches the fourth grade.

“It gives those kids who can’t shine academically a chance to shine,” she adds. “One of my students was horrible academically. He was a kid who did nothing. But he managed to get the Captain Hook role in ‘Peter Pan’ two years ago and took it seriously and learned his lines. It changed him academically because he acquired a sense of accomplishment. He felt better about himself. He was more motivated.”

Fifth-grade teacher Bruce Takashima likens the performing arts program to a field trip: “Sometimes students learn more than in the classroom.”

Even though rehearsals appear to mean freedom from study, most students seem to take their schoolwork seriously.

“I like acting in plays because I get a break from my schoolwork, but there’s a whole bunch of it over there and I’m going to have to do it sometime today,” fifth-grader Daniel Fair said one day during rehearsals for “Gilligan.”

“Classes are more important because when I’m older I’ll need to know the things I learned in school,” another fifth-grader, April Caskey, says.

Two students who were discovered to have talent while in Dixie’s performing arts program have gotten work in Hollywood, and they attribute their success to Dixie.

Grant Gelt, a sixth-grader whom the Los Angeles Unified School District identified as being gifted in the performing arts, last year had a major role in the Tri-Star motion picture “Avalon.” Most recently he appeared in “The Last Halloween” special on CBS and he guest starred on a segment of the NBC show “Eerie, Indiana.”

Gelt, who wants to study directing in college, says he owes his success to Dixie.

“The director of ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ Mrs. Valley, put me as the magician. That really encouraged me.”

Pamela Allport is glad son Chris, now 14 and a working actor, got a dose of performing arts experience at Dixie several years ago.

“I can’t praise Dixie and the performing arts program enough. We went through bad times. We lost our business. If it hadn’t been for Chris getting work, we . . . .”

Chris, who was identified as being gifted in the performing arts while at Dixie, has since gotten acting and voice-over jobs in the movie industry. He did some looping for the recently released Touchstone film “Paradise” and appeared as a featured singer in a Disney TV special, “American Teacher Awards,” in November, 1990.

While most parents are gung-ho about Dixie’s performing arts program, some have reservations about their children becoming professional actors.

“I want my kid to be a normal kid. He’s not going on ‘Star Search’ and I’m not hoping for him to be an actor,” Orenstein says.

Another mother, whose sixth-grader wants to be an actress, says, “It will pass.”