Tomato Patch, a visual and performing arts program based at Mercer Community College’s Kelsey Theater, has been offering a program in fine arts, theater, dance, music, and video for 40 years. The longest running summer arts program in central New Jersey, Tomato Patch has enabled more than 6,500 junior and senior high school students to explore the arts. Students major in theater, dance, vocal music, video, or visual arts and choose electives of children’s theater, jazz dance, musical theater, comedy, a cappella singing, and more.
While kids attend Tomato Patch for various reasons, it is often to feed an interest in theater and performance. The program has also been known to create the self-confidence needed for public speaking. Many former campers have gone on to make the theater part of their professional world. Although people often think of actors when they think of theater, the actors could not do their job if it were not for the many people working behind the scenes.
Daniel Hoyos, who now makes his living in theater management, caught the theater bug in seventh grade when he took drama class as an elective at what is now known as West Windsor-Plainsboro’s Community Middle School. “It sounded like fun,” he says. “Since there weren’t too many boys in the class, I got to participate in a lot of the exercises, scenes, and games. I was having so much fun doing skits, scenes, and playing theater games in school, I thought, ‘Why not do this over the summer, too?’”
He attended Tomato Patch for one year and returned as a junior counselor the following summer. “It helped me to build a knowledge base about the performing arts,” says Hoyos. “I read, sang, and danced all the basics. I read Shakespeare and tried to figure out what it meant. I learned to do a box step. I looked at sheet music and tried to figure out what all those lines and circles meant. It was great exposure to a complex world.”
He remembers the improv class, and the final performances. “One year we did Rudyard Kipling stories and another year we did a children’s adaptation of ‘The Tempest,’” he says. “I remember doing a big Broadway medley with songs from lots of Broadway musical including ‘A Chorus Line,’ ‘Godspell,’ ‘Annie,’ and ‘Gigi.’ Of course I didn’t know any of those shows back then.”
“Tomato Patch helped me to make friends with common interests,” says Hoyos. “I also met people from other schools in the area, so I had friends all over the place. We would go to each other’s shows to be supportive of each other.”
Hoyos also attended McCarter Theater’s Summer Shakespeare program where he was in a performance of “Much Ado About Nothing.” He studied musical theater at Carnegie Mellon the summer before his senior year of high school. He was also in a performance of “Our Town” at Princeton Summer Theater.
“I wanted to be in every play and musical in high school, and so I was involved in everything I could handle,” Hoyos says. He was on stage in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “The Madness of George III,” “Arsenic and Old Lace,” “Hay Fever,” “Godspell,” “Pippin,” “Damn Yankees,” “West Side Story,” and four years of Senior One Acts.
After graduating from WW-P High School in 1999, he headed to Harvard University, where he studied psychology and graduated with honors. “I loved college and took many English, drama, and literature classes as electives.”
He also spent a lot of time working in theater when he was not studying. He was in “Sweet Charity” and “Cabaret” at Harvard and produced shows for friends. Hoyos also was involved with CityStep, a program in which he taught hip-hop dance in Cambridge elementary schools.
His stage experience at Tomato Patch helped him work behind the scenes in his career path. “Broadway is a small community, but everyone shares the background of growing up being fascinated by it,” says Hoyos. “I understand my work better because I understand the people in my industry and what makes them tick. I can relate to them, so I can help them backstage when they need help.”
He was very involved in the Hasty Pudding Theatrical, the oldest college theater troupe in America, from his sophomore to senior years. “In addition to performing in their student-written musicals, I also worked on the business staff handling advertising and alumni relations,” says Hoyos. “Our shows ran in Cambridge for more than a month, and traveled to New York and Bermuda. I have great memories from those days.”
After graduating from Harvard in 2003, Hoyos moved to New York City to work in theater production. “After working for a theater production office and for Actor’s Equity, the union for actors and stage managers, I decided to work in company management,” he says. “As a company manager I handle the payroll and production office work for a Broadway show — someone has to pay the bills.”
Hoyos has toured the U.S. and Canada with “Les Miserables” and “Disney’s High School Musical.” He has also worked for Lincoln Center Theater (on “South Pacific” among many other shows), The Public Theater, and the Signature Theater Company. He is now working on a new musical called “Hands on a Hardbody,” which opens on Broadway in March.
“Tomato Patch, along with the other arts programs that I participated in, helped me to be unafraid in front of other people,” says Hoyos. “It really helped me in school with speaking in front of the class or nowadays when I’m in front of a group of employees. I’ve tried to keep that confidence up — it’s easier now than it was when I stepped on the stage for the first time. I’m less nervous about it now.”
#b#Out of Her Shell, Onto the Stage#/b#
Jackie Robinson caught the theater bug when she was about 12 years old. “I chose Tomato Patch because I had a few friends who had attended and suggested I go,” she says. She was at Tomato Patch as a camper for three years, attended the master class for two years, and was then an instructor for three years. She always took the musical theater class, children’s theater, improvisation classes, and a dance class or two.
Born in Princeton, with the name of Jaclyn, she moved to West Windsor when she was four. “My parents thought that when I was old enough to have a nickname, nobody would remember Jackie Robinson, the baseball player,” says Robinson. Her parents, Colleen and Frank own Cruise One, a home-based travel agency. (The News, January 10, 2003)
At Community Middle School, she was in the performing arts program. She was a fairy in Like 40’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” and played the role of Tintinabula, one of the courtesans from the house of Lycus, in “A Funny thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” She was the assistant stage manager for Like 40’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” also at Kelsey.
Robinson took advantage of every opportunity to work in theater. She often helped to build sets or usher. At High School South she participated in Pirate Players all four years. “I started out acting in them and then co-wrote and directed some of new plays about tolerance,” she says.
At High School South she took a sports medicine class and worked as a student athletic trainer, but clearly her heart was set on theater — not sports. She applied to only one college — Philadelphia’s University of the Arts.
She graduated from University of the Arts with a bachelor’s degree in applied theater arts with a concentration in stage management. She was soon hired as a stage manager for “Reefer Madness. “It landed me my Actors Equity card, making me a union stage manager,” she says. “I have since stage managed various Equity shows including ‘Trenton Lights,’ ‘Pippin,’ and ‘Red.’
Living in Philadelphia, she coaches at Leaps-N-Bounders gymnastics when she is not working on a show.
“Tomato patch is a great introduction to theater; it teaches many skills through games, activities, and skits to help children become comfortable onstage and even in life,” says Robinson. “Tomato Patch actually really helped me out of my shell and I have used these skills in my theatrical career.”
Tomato Patch Visual and Performing Arts Workshops, Mercer Community College, 1200 Old Trenton Road, West Windsor. June 24 to July 18, for grades 8 to 12, $675; July 22 to August 8, grades 5 to 7, $600; July 22 to August 9, master class for grades 8 to 12, $550. Visit www.kelseytheatre.net, call 609-570-3566, or E-mail projects@mccc.edu.
