Sasee Magazine

The world is her stage…the stage is her world.

If Becky Bannon had not come to Myrtle Beach for a summer job in 1966, hundreds of Horry County students might never have known the magical world of live theater. With a newly-minted degree from Marshall University, Becky came here with her roommate to celebrate a summer of fun before adulthood called her to a teaching job in Michigan. And like many before her, and since, Becky fell in love with the Beach – and with a guy. The following summer she married the guy and became an Air Force wife. Frequent moves of military life challenged long-term teaching opportunities, but she loved the excitement of each new assignment, especially their two years in Turkey. Despite close proximity to the raging Greek-Cypriot War, Becky gamely explored the entire region, discovering in herself an innate and lasting wanderlust.

In 1980, the Air Force brought Becky back to Myrtle Beach where she re-booted her teaching career at full speed. For the next 27 years, she changed lives and stirred imaginations of students throughout Horry County, teaching drama, journalism and English at North Myrtle Beach High and Socastee Middle Schools before a nine year stint at the new St. James Middle School under legendary principal, Wendell Shealy. Here Becky came into her own, taking hundreds of enthusiastic middle schoolers along with her. Her journalism classes regularly produced award winning yearbooks, including three years’ selection as the best middle school yearbook in the state and the 1993 Columbia University’s National Yearbook Competition. As heady as all this was, her true passion was not journalism but drama, and each year her students put on major theatrical performances, including memorable productions of The Secret Garden and The Velveteen Rabbit.

Becky loved St. James Middle School and the students, staff and parents who supported and encouraged her at every turn. She bought a home nearby and planned to stay there forever. Fate and Wendell Shealy, however, had other plans! In 1997 Shealy was named head of the new Carolina Forest Education Center, which became separate high school and middle schools housed on the same campus. He had a secret plan, a sure bet to lure Becky to come with him: a full schedule of her first love, drama. Bannon visited the school site, saw plans for its auditorium, and knew she wanted to direct plays there and continue working with her friend and mentor.

Looking back on our lives, we often see particular moments, specific choices that change us forever. For Becky Bannon, the move to Carolina Forest was surely one of these. Budget concerns cut the dream auditorium to a smaller, sparsely equipped facility with no stage steps, spotlights or curtains, but Becky did not let this deter her. She conned her friend, builder Wayne Vereen, into constructing steps, borrowed lights on poles from the First Baptist Church and conjured 40 middle and high school students into putting on a full-fledged Broadway musical, Give my Regards to Broadway. Despite the lack of sets, props and curtains, the show was a huge success, and tickets sales were sufficient to cover costs! Joining forces with Carolina Forest High’s drama and choral directors, Wayne Canady and Kraig McBroom, Becky’s new Dream Team immediately began to plan the next year’s performance.

Horry County schools receive no funding for drama, so all productions must be self-supporting. In 1999 a $4,000 donation from the Horry County Cultural Arts Association provided seed money for Carolina Forest to buy equipment and production essentials. Since then, ticket sales have sustained all the program’s costs, a tribute both to its high regard and the staff’s unlimited talent and imagination. Each year the shows have become increasingly exciting and challenging, replete with professional sets and a live orchestra. A friend, Margaret Ammons, describes the creative process this way: “Becky goes to New York, loves what she sees, and determines, ‘We can do that!’ Then everybody – students, faculty, parents and the community – inspired by her certainty, makes it happen.”

What happens is nothing less than the 2002 production of Peter Pan which involved the use of flying equipment rented from a company in Tennessee, five students who flew, five adults who assisted and five parents who took vacation time to train with the company’s owner in operating the equipment! Recent shows have run ten to thirteen performances, with casts up to 150 and productions costs as high as $32,000 include Cats, Wizard of Oz, Annie, The Music Man and the unforgettable Beauty and the Beast (which once again utilized flying equipment in the scene where the Beast levitates). Wendell Shealy says, “The only time I remember having to veto any aspect of a production of Becky’s was her plan to use a real horse in The Music Man!”

Meanwhile, back in the middle school classroom, Becky taught six classes of drama with waiting lists of students who recognized her to be, as Wendell Shealy described, “one of these exemplary teachers who demand, expect and ultimately get the very best from her students.” In 2000, inspired by a summer trip to Verona, Italy (the setting of Romeo and Juliet), Becky came home with an idea to launch a five-day, school-wide Shakespeare Festival. In preparation, social studies students learned about class structure in Elizabethan England, band students practiced English madrigals and consumer science classes sold artificial flowers to be woven into crowns for the grand finale: a spectacular Elizabethan Banquet and student performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

In 2007 Becky retired from the classroom but certainly not from the stage. She continues to work with Wayne Canady and Kraig McBroom in the annual Carolina Forest productions which become bolder and more exciting each year. The 2010 tour de force presentation, Grey Gardens, the Musical, is the first Broadway musical ever based on a documentary, and Carolina Forest was the first high school in the U.S. to perform it. Set in the crumbling Grey Gardens mansion, the tragicomedy tells the riches to rags mother-daughter story of Jacqueline Kennedy’s aunt and first cousin. There are two acts, one set in the early 1940s glory days, the second set in 1973 when the two are struggling to maintain reality and subsistence. Canady designed a turntable stage which revolved as needed for the earlier and later timeframes. They enjoyed tremendous support from the Broadway producers and cast, as well as from producers of the original documentary and several individuals whose lives are portrayed in the play.

Then there is High Steppin’ Country! This musical revue has been presented at Lakewood Camp Ground every summer since 1976, with Becky serving as stage manager for 27 of its 33 years. The longest-running show on the Grand Strand, the two hour extravaganza features fourteen talented young singers and dancers in a non-stop celebration of the ‘80s, country, gospel and patriotic music. Many of its current performers trained with Bannon and the Carolina Forest team, including Rosa Rea and Richard Gebo who starred in Beauty and the Beast. Several others are second-generation performers, such as Austin Perry whose mother Rhonda performed with the group for ten years. This must-see summer show at the oceanfront Lakewood Amphitheater is family-friendly, affordable and open to the public.

Becky has also found ways to combine her love of travel, passion for drama and desire to share its magic with young people. Following her divorce in 1987, she began taking groups of 40-45 middle school students to New York City each year for four-day theater trips. She also worked with American Student Travel, meeting and escorting student groups to Broadway performances which, at last count, totals 78 for Bannon. “How lucky am I!” she exclaims.

Great passion for life is a trait Becky has passed on to her two sons, Dean and Brad. Dean has Becky’s free spirit and her love of travel. He has backpacked through Europe, done scuba diving in the Caribbean and worked at ski resorts in Germany and West Virginia. Dean also worked with High Steppin’ Country as a sound technician for ten years. Brad, on the other hand, shares Becky’s love of drama and her perfectionism. A criminal defense attorney, Brad first became interested in law as a member of the Socastee High School 1988 national champion Mock Trial Team. He has won a number of high profile cases, including the highly publicized 2007 trial of the Duke Lacrosse Team. Brad’s work in representing David Evans, the team’s captain, uncovered flaws in the prosecution’s DNA evidence and ultimately exonerated the entire team. He has been the featured in numerous books, television segments and films. Brad and his wife, Carmen, live in the Raleigh area.

Looking back on all she has experienced and accomplished since arriving in Myrtle Beach those many years ago, Becky’s greatest sense of pride comes not from lofty dramatic feats but from knowing she has changed the lives of many young people, a conviction regularly affirmed by her students past and present. A recent note from 2010 Carolina Forest graduate Andrew Bettke perhaps says it best. Paraphrasing Alexander Pope’s famous line – and Bannon’s mantra to her students – he wrote:

“Mrs. Bannon, thank you for all your support and guidance over the years. I have always been grateful for your confidence in me and appreciate the ‘character’ that you have instilled in me. I will always ‘act well my part,’ for I know ‘there is where the honor lies.’”