Ava Cashman: What is your favorite restaurant in West Hartford?
Kyle Reynolds: Harvest. I love harvest. I admittedly haven’t tried a lot of them. Mr. Bane always tries to get me to go to Vinted. Harvest is my favorite. I’m quick to go there after shows or musicals, but they close too early, which is not my favorite part about Harvest. If I had to give them feedback, it would be to stay open later.
AC: What is your favorite way to celebrate after a musical, dance performance, or other performing arts event at KO?
KR: At that point, the students are pretty sick of me because we’ve spent so much time together, and I want them to go celebrate. So normally it is dinner with my wife somewhere and then it is 48 hours of just pure sleep. Like I don’t wake up for two days. I basically hibernate because it is so exhausting, and I hope that the kids do the same.
AC: What’s a quote you live by?
KR: This is so funny. This is so not Mr. Reynolds. My high school senior quote was from Kanye West. That’s sort of before he went off the edge. This was a long time ago. And it was “Make something out of nothing, that’s what I did.” So Kanye came from nothing, and so did I. My whole life I’ve built programs from nothing, built classes from nothing, built relationships from nothing, built partnerships from nothing. And I just know how to start from scratch and build, build, build, and so I live by that. “Make something out of nothing.” Even if it doesn’t exist, it doesn’t mean that it can’t.
AC: Do you have a favorite KO tradition?
KR: I would say the musical, or especially Choreographer Showcase because I started it. Like, there was no dance program before Mr. Reynolds. So that is very inspiring to me. Also this year, Ava, you just saw, we had so many kids on that stage. “Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone,” there was like 25 kids in that number. I liked that because it’s something that I built, and I nurture it like a little baby. Outside of the arts, I would say Class Night because I get to see the kids do arts on stage without me having to panic. They get to sing, and they get to play the violin or play the piano and it has nothing to do with me, and I can just sit and watch and enjoy.
AC: If you could only take three things to a desert island, what would you bring?
KR: I would bring a phone so that I can have all of my music and the Internet, and I’m going to assume there’s Wi-Fi even if there’s not. I’m going to break the rule. And my phone comes with a hotspot, so I will be able to access all the great Broadway musical tunes and watch things. I would say, my wife and my daughter. We would just have a phone and the two of us, and that’s all I really need I guess.
AC: Who is your favorite musician to listen to?
KR: I have to be honest, I listen to musical theater 99.9% of the time. I love a good Barbara Streisand, I love a good Beyoncé, Todrick Hall. Oh, and no one knows her but she’s incredible: her name is Celisse Henderson. She’s an incredible, incredible artist. She recently has started to open concerts for Brandi Carlile, but she did a little bit of Broadway and then realized that she wanted to go do her own thing. Look her up, Celisse Henderson.
AC: What’s your favorite thing to do on a day off?
KR: What day off? Can I just leave it there?
AC: What’s one item in your office that you can’t live without?
KR: I love my office so much. Dual monitors. I look back and forth at so many spreadsheets and so many schedules and so many calendars. I can’t survive without two screens. I would even bring my laptop to study hall and I won’t get anything done because I need two.
AC: If you could have a walk-up song playing every time you enter a room, what would it be?
KR: “Lose My Breath” by Destiny’s Child. Listen to the drums in the beginning.
AC: What’s your favorite place you’ve traveled to?
KR: As a Cancer, I love water. I would say a beach house or a lake house that my family has gone to. When I was little, my entire family lived in England, so I went to England quite often. I would say I loved going there. And one year my dad surprised us with tickets to Egypt, and we went in the pyramids, and it was so hot, but seeing Egypt at 10 years old was pretty cool.
AC: If you could teach a class at KO on anything, what would it be?
KR: I could do history of musical theater, but that’s too on par for who I am. I would want it to be on retail negotiation. One of my secret strengths is that I can go to Target and something that’s $20, I can get it for five. I negotiate – Target, Walmart, Ocean State Job Lot – it’s all about the negotiation. I once bought a patio set at Ocean State Job Lot that was $800 for $249. I talked them down and down and down.
AC: At full-on, corporate, retail stores? That’s incredible. Who is an actor or director that you admire?
KR: There’s two and then there’s an extra answer. Bob Fosse, yet what no one knows about Bob is that, really, his wife Gwen [Verdon] did most of the work, I should say most of the work. And he wouldn’t survive without her, so I would say Gwen. Michael Bennett, who directed “A Chorus Line,” but his assistant was Bob Avian, and Bob Avian really never got the applause. He just came out with his memoir before he passed, called “Dancing Man,” and he gave the inside scoop of how much he really did, and it was a lot. I would say the underdog, the Gwen Verdon, or the Bob Avian, who did all the work but didn’t get a lot of applause.
AC: What’s your favorite season and why?
KR: I mean, what are seasons anymore? It’s November 17 and it is beautiful outside. I would say any day with a good breeze because global warming is real. I would say fall, but is it fall right now? It’s almost winter. Fall. Keep going, this is so fun!
AC: What is your go-to coffee order? Or no coffee at all?
KR: I stopped drinking coffee on August 4, 2017, because I felt like I had an addiction to it. And I went on a cruise with my wife and the coffee was so terrible that I just decided no more. So now I’m a tea drinker. I am a coconut tea drinker. Toasted coconut tea with a dash of cream. It’s in my office, I’ll give you one.
AC: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
KR: Say yes. Say yes to everything. Every job, every audition, every opportunity – you never know where it’s going to take you. Say yes. It’s so dangerous to say no because you never know what you’re missing out on. Although people may disagree, I say yes a lot.
AC: What musical character would you want to be best friends with?
KR: Well, my favorite musical of all time is “Hello, Dolly!” and so I think I’d want to be friends with Dolly. Talk about negotiators, she is an incredible, independently strong, funny, charismatic person who really knows herself. Wait, friends with her, or be her? I would want to be Dolly’s friend for sure. She’s a go-getter.
AC: What inspired you to choose “A Chorus Line” as this year’s winter musical?
KR: I finally feel like we’re at a place where we can do it well with the very talented dancers that we have. It is all dance. It is all dance, and we had more people than ever in Choreographer Showcase this year. I purposely brought in two ballet teachers because ballet is the foundation of all dance, and I knew if I did that for Choreographer Showcase it would pay off for the musical. It’s a show that I love. It’s a show that I connect with on so many levels. You know what else too? I remember, on the very first day of school, Mr. Dillow talking to our community about persevering. And it’s the story of 17 people who all need to desperately persevere or they cannot pay their bills. If they don’t get the job, it’s life or death. Right? And so you have to persevere, you have to push through, and I think that’s a lesson that all of us in our community are working on because it’s hard. It’s a challenge, and it’s rigorous. I don’t choose shows that I don’t think we can do well, and looking at the talent that we have, I know we can do this well. We’re ready.
AC: What’s the best piece of advice you would give your high school self or any of the high school students you are working with right now?KR: I think a couple of things. Trust your gut. You already have all the tools inside of you to be successful. What seems so big right now is actually so small. The world is a big, big place, and there’s so much to achieve and so much to tackle, so many walls to hit, so many times to fall down, so many times to get back up. West Hartford must feel like your thing, right? And the world is huge. I grew up in Watertown and I just thought that was the whole world, and it’s not. There’s so many things to say yes to, there’s so many opportunities. And what would I tell the kids? Say yes. I want to find a nicer version of “you got this.” I just feel like we second-guess ourselves so often. In you, I feel like you’re born with a set of tools. You don’t need anything but you. You’re good. I’ve tried to surround myself with people who pave paths for me instead of block paths for me. And so I would surround myself with my right crew. Be kind, be really, really kind to everybody. You never know who’s going to remember you and offer you something. The whole reason I got into public speaking is I took a public speaking class in college, and I was the class clown by far. I thought it was such a joke, and I knew I was going to get an A, and I treated that class like it was my standup routine. I just thought it was my spotlight. “Wait, everyone has to listen to me? Oh! Great!” The teacher would give us these requirements, and I would do the requirements, but take it on my own thing. I remember kids buckling over laughing, like I really thought I was going to get my own next Netflix special. And then I was graduating college. I had nowhere to live, not $1 to my name. I was planning to go to New York and sleep on the streets until I could get an audition. And my public speaking teacher called me and said “Do you remember me?” I said “Yes,” I thought I was in trouble because I was such a class clown. And she “I’m the head of this program at the University of Hartford, and if you come right now, I can give you a free Master’s degree, and I’ll give you a place to live. In lieu, you have to teach public speaking for me. So every day I taught public speaking from 8:00 to 12:00 in the morning, and then I had a break from 1:00-5:00, and then from 6:00-10:00 I took classes for free to get my Master’s degree. And once you have your Master’s degree, that piece of paper allows you to do a lot of things. I became a college professor very quickly after that. And then that break from 1:00-5:00, one day I got a call from the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts, which happens to run every day from 1:00-4:00. And they said, “Well, you can teach musical theater for us.” And that’s what I did, and that was just because people remembered me, or people knew my name. I guess being the class clown isn’t always a terrible thing. A respectful class clown, that is. But yeah, she offered me a free place to live, a free Master’s degree, a job, and it changed my whole life.
