Instructors
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RICHARD ALDAG Marvelous Mozart RICHARD ALDAG was engaged as the Executive Director of the Napa Valley
Symphony in November 2006. Prior to coming to the Symphony, Richard had
served as Executive Director of the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra and
as a Development Manager at Quinn Associates, a San Francisco based arts
management and fundraising company serving non-profit arts organizations.
Other administrative positions he has held include Executive Director
of Los Lupeños de Sa José and Founder/Director of the Silicon Valley Youth
Conservatory at San Jose State University. As an educator, he has served
on the faculties of San Jose State University, Fordham University, the
Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College, and the Brooklyn Conservatory
of Music. Richard is an active composer whose works have been commissioned
and performed by the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, Earplay, the Shanghai
Symphony, the Queens Symphony Orchestra, and others. JEFF APPLEBAUM: Today's World of Standup Comedy After 18 years in California, New York native JEFF APPLEBAUM is finally learning to speak English. Jeff's clean comedy examines his particular life experiences, which include being the only white kid on his Little League team in Queens, having a Chinese wife who orders from takeout menus in fluent Mandarin and raising a son who calls himself Jewnese because he says it sounds better than Chineish. Jeff made his national TV debut on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. He has performed with comic legends Robert Klein, Richard Lewis, Robin Williams and Kevin Pollak. Jeff was cast by Sandy Hackett, the late Buddy Hackett's son, to play the principal role of Joey Bishop in the long-running musical tribute The Rat Pack is Back. He also appears in the The Pursuit of Happyness with Will Smith. In addition, Jeff won the Comedian of the Year 2003 in the San Francisco Bay Area Cabaret Competition. Jeff has not one but two engineering degrees from MIT. He currently lives with his wife and three children in Silicon Valley. RALPH BEREN: Jewish Humor: On the Other Hand... Ralph Beren taught high school outside of Philadelphia in the 1960s before getting his doctorate in education. Two of his students, in different years, were baseball Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson (at Cheltenham High School) and current Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu (whose family lived in Cheltenham, Pennsylvania during Netanyahu's high school years). After moving to the Bay Area in 1995, he directed the secondary teacher training program at San Francisco State University until his retirement in 2006. In recent years, Beren has taught Jewish humor at - in his estimation - every JCC in the Bay Area and dozens of synagogues. He's bound to pop up at any time on a Jewish organization's schedule, although he does have a steady gig, as well: teaching a Jewish humor class to high school students at Congregation Kol Shofar in Tiburon. SONNY BUXTON Big Band Jazz Sonny Buxton has worked as a producer with such musical greats as Ray Charles, B.B. King, Stan Getz, Tito Puente and James Brown, and has performed with Peggy Lee and Billy Eckstine. His dream of founding jazz nightspots in San Francisco was culminated with the creation of Milestones Jazz Club and Jazz at Pearl’s. Currently, Sonny can be found hosting Midday Jazz on KCSM. He is also a lecturer at Stanford University, The Fromm Institute at the University Of San Francisco and other locations. JOE CORSO: Musical Comedy Tonight As a graduate student of Shakespeare studies and Musical Theater, JOE CORSO moonlighted in Long Island theater in New York. He began teaching Adult Education Musical Theater and Shakespeare classes in 1989. Since 1998, Joe has co-hosted over 145 Road Scholar programs with his wife, Barbara, in California and New York. He also taught Road Scholar courses on American Musical Theater, Opera and Hollywood Operetta, including classes on Verdi and Shakespeare, Shakespeare on Broadway, the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart / Hammerstein, Leonard Bernstein, Lerner and Loewe, Frank Loesser, Harry Warren and Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. Joe was a member of the "Writing for the Musical Theater" class and workshops, New School for Social Research in New York City from 1976 to 1981, and wrote librettos (books and song lyrics) for A Shadow of Her Own and Washington: A Man and His Country, musical plays produced by the New Hyde Park Players in June 1982 and June 1976, respectively. Joe also teaches Shakespeare classes during summers in upstate New York for Road Scholar and other groups. JERRY FROHMADER Comedic Musicians
JERRY FROHMADER is accomplished both inside and outside the classroom. His professional hats include composer, performer, teacher and arts administrator. His compositions have been performed in cities and universities throughout the U.S. and Europe. During his tenure as Assistant Dean in the School of Music at the California Institute of Arts, he composed a musical score for the opera Victory Over The Sun by Malevich. It was performed at the L.A. County Museum of Art, The Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., the New Theater Festival in Berlin and Amsterdam, the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Aspen Music Festival. Outside the classroom, he designs music for multimedia projects and the web as well as produces music for TV commercials, videos and films. As a professional musician, keyboards & saxophone, he has performed with the New Jersey Symphony, Clark Terry, AM Los Angeles and the Jerry Lewis Telethon. In addition, he is an instructor for Road Scholar with recognition from ABC News, Peter Jennings, CNN Travel and most recently a PBS program, SPARK, which featured Jerry in a segment called American Music. MICHAEL GRAHAM The U.S. Constitution JEHON GRIST Dead Sea Scrolls: An Enduring Mystery Jehon Grist received his Ph.D. in Near East studies at the University of California at Berkeley and has done doctorate work at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has done archaeological research on the biblical city of Tel Gezer at Beir El Balah in the Gaza Strip and studies in the Valley of the Queens at Luxor, Egypt. He is the assistant director of Lehr House Judaica in Berkeley, the Bay Area's largest Jewish adult education program. He has been published in archaeological journals. DOUGLAS KENNING DOUGLAS KENNING was conceived in Japan, born in California, raised in Virginia and lived in many corners of the U.S. and the globe before finding a home in Sicily. He received a Ph.D. in literature and philosophy from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and has been a biologist, actor, army officer, Manhattan taxi driver, academic administrator, university professor, tour guide, etc. He has published books, articles, and stage plays. He lives half the year in the Bay Area, teaching subjects related to the history of the Mediterranean, and half the year in Sicily, where he runs a small tour guide business. From a history-besotted childhood growing up across the river from Jamestown, to his university historical studies, to his world travels, to his researches into his own German and Italian ancestry at Ellis Island, to genealogy research for others as part of his tour business, to recent work on the story of Angel Island, Douglas Kenning pulls together a lifetime of interest in immigration. Check out his website at: http://www.sicily-tour.com/32.html. MARK LEVY Great Jewish Comedians MARK LEVY has performed and taught in the Bay Area for 25 years at synagogues, Jewish community centers, Lehrhaus Judaica, Workmen's Circle, and other Jewish groups. He has appeared throughout the country and abroad as a singer and lecturer who specializes in traditional Judaic folk music in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Ladino, Klezmer history and theory, and general Jewish music history. He has performed for the Yeshiva University's Sephardic Dept.'s Semana Sepharad in New York, and is a cantorial soloist in California. He recently released a fourth album of Jewish music entitled Bin Ikh Mir A Shnayderl: Yiddish Work Songs, in commemoration of the 100th birthday of Workmen's Circle, a fraternal order of Jewish workers and their families. SUSANNA LOMBARDI French Impressionism JOE MARCHI JOE MARCHI received his B.A. from San Francisco State University in 1952 and his M.A. from Teachers College Columbia University in 1957. He taught English and was a counselor in high school before joining the faculty of Canada College in Redwood City in 1968 where he was a professor, counselor, and Assistant Dean of Students. In 1984 he established the Center for the American Musical whose collection is now part of the San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum. He had a radio show for seven years and is currently hosting a bi-weekly TV show, "Regards to Broadway" for Pacifica TV. Since retirement, he speaks to many groups about musical theater and is a member of the San Francisco Theater Bay Area Critics Circle. In addition to teaching for BACL, Joe also lectures on Princess Cruises. MAUREEN O'BRIEN French Impressionism Maureen O'Brien earned both her B.A. and her M.A. at Dominican University in San Rafael, California. She has taught art history courses at Sonoma State University, Dominican University and the College of Marin. Currently, she guest lectures at Dominican University and the College of Marin. RAND RICHARDS: San Francisco History & Neighborhoods RAND RICHARDS is a San Francisco-based historian, author and lecturer.He is a member of the California Historical Society, the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society, and the San Francisco History Association. Rand has written three books: "Historic San Francisco: A Concise History and Guide", "Historic Walks in San Francisco: 18 Trails Through the City's Past" and "Mud, Blood, and Gold: San Francisco in 1849." He has a B.A. in history from the University of Minnesota and an MBA from San Francisco State University. Rand has lived in San Francisco since 1972 except for a year spent in Paris, France where he taught international marketing at Schiller College. In 1995, he received a coveted invitation to the Gorbachev Foundation's State of the World Forum for world leaders in San Francisco where he met Mikhail Gorbachev. In 2005, Rand was the recipient of the San Francisco History Association's Oscar Lewisward for his contributions to knowledge of San Francisco history. JOHN ROTHMANN Middle East at the Crossroads JOHN ROTHMANN is a political and foreign policy consultant specializing in the United States, Middle East and the former Soviet Union. Mr. Rothmann received his B.A. and M.A. from Whittier College and studied at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He worked on the 1968 presidential campaign staff of Richard Nixon, served as Chief of Staff to Senator Milton Marks and Field Representative for Senator Quentin Kopp in San Francisco. Mr. Rothmann has been involved in a broad variety of political campaigns on local, state and national levels, and is a frequent lecturer on American politics and the presidency. He served as project consultant on the books Jews in America and A Day in the Life of Israel. Mr. Rothmann is the co-author of the best selling book Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam, published by Random House in 2008. He also hosts his own talk show on KGO radio, a local ABC affiliate. SETH SHOSTAK: Life in Space Seth Shostak is the senior astronomer at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestial Intelligence) Institute. For much of his career, Seth conducted radio astronomy research on galaxies, and currently hosts the SETI Institute’s science radio show, “Big Picture Science.” He is the author of “Confessions of an Alien Hunter: A Scientist’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.” Seth holds a degree in physics from Princeton and a doctorate in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology. JOHN STANLEY Walt Disney & His Dynasty ARLENE TAYLOR Age-Proof Your Brain Dr. Arlene Taylor holds a master’s and two doctorate degrees and is an internationally known expert on brain-function research. Using metaphor and practical application, she makes brain-function research come alive in empowering presentations. Accomplished on piano, organ and vibes, Arlene also uses emerging knowledge about music and the brain to create fascinating seminars. She is founder and president of Realizations Inc, a nonprofit corporation that promotes brain-function research. BONNIE WEISS Poets of Broadway Bonnie Weiss is a seasoned theatre educator, writer, and radio and cabaret producer. She has served as writer, producer and director for ten Bay Area cabaret shows, including producing work of Stephen Sondheim's. She holds a BA in Theater Education and a Master's Degree in counseling from New York University. She is founder and president of Musical Theater Lovers United, a club for Broadway and Hollywood music buffs. She currently teaches musical theater history and appreciation at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and at SFSU's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. In addition, Bonnie writes for Stage Directions, a national magazine for theatre educators, and for The Sondheim Review. BILL WELLBORN Femme Fatales of Opera Concert pianist, teacher and host of the radio program "Piano Legacy", William Wellborn performs and lectures throughout the U.S. and Europe. Dr. Wellborn holds degrees from the University of Texas at Austin and the New England Conservatory and is on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music where he teaches courses in piano, piano history and opera. |
