Stephen Montoya
Anthony Pound, the Fort Worth Opera’s new director of education and community engagement.
For nearly twenty years, Anthony Pound, the Fort Worth Opera’s new director of education and community engagement, lived and worked in what many consider the epicenter of the theater world — New York City. However, after the world shut down in 2020, it became utterly apparent to this long-time theater fan, that things weren’t the same anymore. This is when Pound and his wife basically flipped a coin to decide on where to move to. If heads, the then trio would move to Pound’s hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. But if it were tails, Pound’s family would move to the North Texas area, where his wife’s family lived. Given we are writing about him in his new role, you can gather which way the coin landed.
Years before making a decision to move from the Big Apple to the DFW area, Pound worked with well-known New York companies and renowned theaters such as Blue Man Group and Radio City Music Hall. Pound would eventually land a job working at the New 42/ New Victory Theater, as its assistant director of education and youth engagement, where he found a passion for helping youth find their way in the theater world and the arts.
In 2014, Pound was honored with the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award, presented to him at the White House by Michelle Obama.
In his new role at the FWO, Pound will oversee the activities of the young artists tapped to join the Hattie Mae Lesley Resident Artists program, as well as expanding the role of opera as a crucial art form in and around Fort Worth.
To better understand his role with the FWO and his background, we sat down with Pound to discuss his passion for theater, and what sparked his interest in helping young adults find their artistic voice.
FWM: Tell us about your new role. What are your responsibilities in a nutshell?
AP: As it stands, I have two sort of facets of what I'm doing. One is our Hattie Mae Lesley Resident Artists program that currently has four incredibly talented opera singers. I guess you could call them young to me. They're young, but they're out of college, and about to break into the professional world. They are here for nine months and they sing at our children's shows and they do cover some of our main stage stuff, but they're really here with me to figure out where they're going next, what do they need to help themselves in the audition world, what do they need to become a professional artist? And so that's a big part of what I do is sort of guiding those four and then working with them to illuminate opera to the community to see that opera is this incredible art form that these young people are able to communicate with and share with the community. So that's a really cool facet of what I get to do. The other side, of course, is our school, our performances for kids and family.
FWM: So, you’re kind of a guru for someone who wants to go into performing professionally in the theater arts, right? Like a high school guidance counselor for artists?
AP: That and how to articulate what other options you might have, because not everybody's going to end up on stage at the Met in New York. It's really about helping families, kids, and young people figure out what their options are in the arts, whether that is a full-time, professional career, or what intrinsic skills they learn; what social emotional learning skills that the arts can bring. And that's my background is how to extrapolate the soft skills from the arts and knowing that sometimes it's necessary to be exposed to the arts.
Stephen Montoya
FWM: Tell me a bit about your background. I mean, you're talking about living in New York. Is that where you grew up?
AP: I'm originally from Memphis, Tennessee, grew up there and went to University of Memphis for their BFA and performance program, and then moved to New York City in 2004. I spent 17 years in New York City. So, sort of my life in three acts, right? You get the first world and right after college, sort of learning to be a stage director. That's why I moved to New York City, to learn more about the business, about how to run theaters. My ultimate goal, at that point in the early two thousands, was to come back to Memphis and run a theater, a regional theater. I didn't want to stay in New York. I didn't want to work on Broadway like everyone else does. I wanted to come back and run regional theater. I think the arts in smaller locations is more vital than adding them to an already massive space. But then I got to New York, and I was going to be in New York for two years, and I led one of those magical fairytale lives in New York where my first job was at Radio City Music Hall.
And then I went straight to Blue Man Group and then found the new Victory Theater in the new 42nd Street and was at New 42nd for 14 years and fell in love with arts education. I actually studied at Fordham University to learn how to build mentor programs to use the arts through mentoring and then with the Option Institute in New York to help teenagers get into college and help college students succeed into college.
Working with teenagers I started to feel the neglect in that area that a lot of times people just think teenagers, they'll figure it out or they're too moody, so I'm not going to deal with them. But teenagers from every background need support. Being a teenager is hard, not just in the world, but I spent two years at Wellesley College in Boston and UC, Berkeley, a split program, studying what goes on in the adolescent mind, and it's a nightmare there.
Your attitudes, your feelings, your likes, your dislikes, change sometimes by the hour, but definitely day to day. And there's so many influences, and I knew the arts and mentorship through the arts could be a deciding factor in whether a young person survives or not. And so I immersed myself again, what was supposed to be a couple year jaunt in New York City became a career in arts education and specifically mentorship through the arts, which was great. And I was there from 2004 to 2021. So, I've been in Texas now for three years. The summer of 2021 is when we moved.
FWM: You mentioned that you and your wife flipped a coin to decide where to move to. Why did you leave New York? I mean, that’s where the action is when it comes to theater, right?
AP: It was the pandemic. We thought this is going to be done by the summer of 2020 because surely we're going to get to the Tony Awards and everything's going to be fine. And they skipped the Tony Awards and we're like, ‘okay?' New York doesn't function financially or physically without Broadway. It's not a possibility. So surely, we'll be back by the holidays and then come Thanksgiving, there's no Broadway. There's no Broadway in sight. There's no Broadway over the Christmas holiday, which means there's no tourism, no one's flying anywhere.
Luckily, I still had my job, but I was starting to have to lay off some of my staff and everybody didn't know what was happening. And having a young son at that point, just turning one years old, we didn't have family there. We had people, but none of them were sort of the type of people that we knew would have a place for us to live if we lost something or if one of us got sick. I was watching people rolled out of our apartment building into ambulances, which made Covid real for us.
It was scary. And so we looked at our two home bases, mine being Memphis, Tennessee, and my wife's being Texas. She went to Texas Tech and her aunt, cousins, and brother had settled in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. And we made it a toss-up. We just wanted a place where there were people that could take care of our son because it was a real concern from a job situation. You're working in the arts, so you really have no idea where the arts, especially theater, is ever coming back anywhere. And so, we came here because I knew some people in Dallas because there's a close connection between New York Theater and Dallas Theater, Dallas Theater Center and the public theater in New York, and then Broadway, Dallas, or the Dallas Summer musicals is what it was called at the time.
This move really became about having kids. The world that I was living in, in New York, the constant, constant hustle, doing three or four shows at a time wasn't going to work. I’m leaving in the morning at 6 o'clock and not getting back till midnight or later, that's what it takes to really start something new like that, especially in theater. And I live for my kids more now that I have two. Honestly, I love my kids and I will never work in a situation that doesn't let me prioritize my family and doing something like that would never allow for that. I still direct freelance, and of course my heart will always be in arts education, but yeah, I'm not in that head space anymore. Of course I say that, and someone walks in tomorrow and is like, ‘Here's a theater, do you want to run it?’ I’d have to say I don't know.
