Al Fine: Founding Faculty Vania Jerome reflects on a transformative 19 year journey

Vania Jerome, the face of the Maui Prep Arts program for the past 19 years, has just completed the ultimate farewell tour. In the span of just 5 weeks, she and her Performing Arts team produced an unprecedented third full-length Broadway musical with her Upper School students, sang and performed her way through May Day, and kept the Maui Prep community rocking at the annual Arts Night. Each event is imbued with her special touches, her expertise, and her talent. For a program that has had one distinguished captain at the helm for nearly two decades, her departure marks the end of an era. After closing her classroom, Vania celebrates the start of her new voyage with a trip to Australia. While experiencing the culture of Sydney and catching up with former students and classmates made for a memorable experience, Vania quickly slips out of vacation mode, ready to return to Maui. Vania is a true artist, never pausing from creating, imagining, reinventing. And she’s a long way from her canvas. 

Vania Lee is the second daughter of Korean immigrants. Her parents, who met and married in Korea, settled in Los Angeles a few years prior to her birth. Vania recalls the attic loft that the family of four occupied while her father toiled as a janitor and her mother tended to the children that lived in the main home beneath their living space. Her mother’s monthly pay, $50, was often docked to cover damages or breakages inflicted by the children under her watch. When the monthly reckoning came, her mother realized that her services were rendered for free when damages exceeded her monthly pay. Vania’s father resettled the family in the Highland Park area, a melting pot of Chinese, Filipino, and Mexican immigrants, among others. Vania’s mother still lives in that home to this day. 

Vania’s first experience with the piano was while perched on her father’s lap as he played.  She took formal piano lessons from for seven years starting when she was four years old. At age 13, she joined a semi-professional youth choir that performed live and on TV, performing for audiences across the country and in Asia. An orchestra concert in her teens inspired her to resume piano training with an exclusive studio. Her instructor helped her prepare for an audition for UCLA’s Piano Performance program.

Acceptance to UCLA's music program was intended to serve as a springboard for Mrs Jerome to complete the necessary prerequisites to attend dental school. However, the UCLA College of Music was in the midst of transforming itself into a conservatory, so the students were expected to devote themselves fully to their music studies. “It was never my intention to go into music. I was going to be a dentist,” laughs Mrs Jerome. “Dentists make good money and I still can be a doctor!” Mrs Jerome even considered pursuing a math major but, “I had so much fun in the music department, I just kind of stayed.” 

In her free time, Vania worked as a student accompanist for the student chamber choirs and at churches and temples. She brightly recalls a transformative moment when she was toiling away at the keyboard in one of the practice rooms on campus. Her choir professor, well-known in the world of choral and orchestral conducting, approached her and coyly suggested that she consider the choral conducting graduate program. “Never in my wildest dream [did I] consider going into conducting. The piano was my instrument!” The program was prestigious, with many students competing for a coveted spot. Mrs Jerome had appeared on the professor’s radar as he watched how she worked with singers individually, arranging their sections, then bringing them all together in melodious and memorable harmony. 

While he had specifically recruited Mrs Jerome, she still had to nail her audition and complete the last classes required for her undergraduate degree before she would be accepted into the program. The audition was held in the midst of her chamber choir’s travel to perform at an International Music Festival in Japan. “He could see what I was doing with what little I did know how to do,” recalls Jerome. “But I still had five classes to complete to graduate before I could enter in the fall.” Vania crammed all five courses into the shortened summer term, finding Ancient Roman History to be her most formidable opponent.

Vania flourished in the graduate program, gaining experience in conducting choirs as well as orchestras. That exposure was important as she continued to work with church choirs. “The two years I was there, I was the only female conducting student in that program. I felt really proud of myself for that.” Jerome had a job lined up at the Los Angeles Opera, while still considering a move to San Francisco or New York to enter the opera world. Her personal life was taking shape as well. Her fiance, Jason Jerome, (now husband of 27 years) was living and working on Maui. A one week vacation to the Valley Isle left Vania with a scorching case of the aloha spirit. The subliminal reminders of the islands back in Los Angeles left her homesick for a place that was not even her home. “All of a sudden, everywhere I looked, there were traces of Hawaii. Whether it was a Hawaii license plate [on a car] driving along the freeway or a Hawaiian garden in Southern California, everything was just pointing me back to being there.” Jerome made a few more reconnaissance visits, feeling out the employment scene. “Will there be a job for me? There's no opera on Maui, and only the Honolulu Theatre on Oahu.” Jerome took her chances that she would be able to put her talents to work and packed up and moved to Maui. “When people found out that I was a musician and I could teach piano, everybody was very, very excited, especially here on the West Side, because there was nothing.”Within days of relocating, Vania landed her first job with Theater Theater Maui. “I stepped off the plane on July 8th and a few days later I was at my first rehearsal in tech week for Theatre Theatre Maui's production. That just kind of opened all the doors for me.” Vania was the music teacher at Sacred Hearts School for four years, and later volunteered her services at Carden Academy West, where her son JJ ‘17 was a student. The Carden Academy was dissolving just as Maui Prep was taking form and Vania was hired to teach music at the new Napili independent school. As “Founding Faculty,” she toiled alongside the parents, faculty, and trustees to lay the groundwork of a college preparatory school for the west side. 

When the director of the school’s first production, You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, fell ill, Vania stepped in as director. The production was truly “all hands on deck” as every faculty member chipped in as costumers, marketers or set designers. Though music was her wheelhouse, the administration approached Vania about taking over the drama department. She agreed to fill the role until a worthy replacement could be found. “I said sure and assumed it would be just for a year,” recalls Jerome. “I did that for a year and then one year turned into two years and two years turned into now 19 years later.” It is difficult to comprehend that Vania is not comfortable in the director’s role as she has churned out quality production after quality production. “It's always been the music [for me]. I love to direct and I can do it, but it's not like with music. I have a confidence to it. I just know what I want. I know how it's going to be.”

Jerome continues, “I've tried to take some [directors’] workshops here and there to educate myself because I want to give the children the best that I can.” It is this passion and dedication that has driven Jerome. Before the completion of the Bozich Center in 2020, Maui Prep Performing Arts had no official home. The cast performed in hotel ballrooms of many west Maui resorts and the former ‘Ulalena Theater. One year, when no suitable venue could be secured, a stage and tents were erected in the Lower School quad. Jerome slept on the portable cot in the tech booth all week to stand watch over the pricey audio/visual equipment in case of inclement weather. She collaborated with every performing arts organization on this island to secure costumes, props, or set pieces and brought in seasoned professionals to help prepare her actors and singers for the stage. She also relied on parents to fill in the gaps, sewing, crafting, painting. “I was a one woman show for the majority of the time.” 

Jerome first joined forces with Performing Arts faculty Kristi Scott with Willy Wonka Jr over a decade ago. As a seasoned director and self-proclaimed “drama queen,” Scott was the missing piece that helped Jerome achieve her artistic vision for her productions. Eventually, the school added Scott, dance mentor Jackie Dowsett, and Aida Rose (who attended Maui Prep as a middle schooler the inaugural year!) as part-time faculty. With her dream team in place, Jerome hoped her lightened load would “allow me to do more overseeing, supervising, collaborating.” She worked to transform the entire Arts department into a cohesive program that reinforced the academic learning the students were approaching in their other classes. She sought to show that performing and creating are as much of a medium for self-expression and analysis as the pen. In true Vania fashion, she went out with a flourish, a grand finale for a venerated career with her final musical theater production, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.

Vania and her team typically produced two musical theater productions each year: one for the Lower School and one for Middle and Upper School students. Staging three productions in the 23-24 school year was unprecedented, and for the first time, the cast would consist of only Upper School students, allowing the play preparations to be held during the elective block rather than as an extracurricular activity. Vania and her team did not have to compete with sports, employment, or family and personal time to coach the young actors. “Usually we would just barely have time to teach all the music, the lines blocking, where to go, and the kids would get on stage to perform,” explains Jerome. “Deep-diving into the characters was always missing.”

With her more focused preparation time, she asked the actors to understand their characters’ backstories. “We ask them to do it in their reading and writing analysis in their English classes. Because we were able to do it in the class, they were much more prepared and they were much more invested.” she muses. With the actors firmly rooted in their characters, Vania went to work on the musical numbers. “All of the singing, the harmonies, the strength, everything, the character with the choreography, all of that was at a much higher level.” She was also excited to tackle more mature content (yet still appropriate for high school theater). “It was a comedy, but it dove into some issues that don't necessarily get talked about.” The Tony Award-winning musical brings together six ambitious spellers competing for Bee glory while revealing their motivations, family life, and insecurities in on-stage asides. 

As she reflects on her 19 years at Maui Prep, she beams at the mention of the 7AM Band.  In 2008, the students in her music class formed a choir that was invited to perform at the Relay For Life, a community-based fundraising event for the American Cancer Society. The event featured live performances by local artists, including a student rock band from another Maui high school. Impressed by their performance, the students started jamming together on their own. “They realized they kind of needed some guidance, so they asked if it could be a class.” The technicality and goals of the band did not work within the elective block so Jerome suggested they meet regularly outside of school hours. Thus the 7AM band was born, so named because the class met at 7:00 in the morning (the name was chosen over the other suggestion “Morning Coffee”). Rehearsals taught them more than just performing, as they learned to harmonize, analyze music, sing with different dynamics, and express themselves emotionally to connect with the audience.

One of the first songs that the band learned was September by Earth, Wind & Fire. “I hoped that the band would last and this would be the anthem,” recalls Jerome. “When former students come, we can always call them up and sing with us. That's not going to be part of the set. It's always going to be the encore song.” And September rounds out the set when 7AM performs at the annual Arts Night. Its mid-May scheduling ensures that many alumni attend after their college semesters wrap up, and Vania’s vision is fulfilled as they gather around microphones to sing the encore.  

Vania thinks deeply about the legacy that she leaves behind as she steps down as the Director of Arts after 19 years. “If anybody were to ask any student about Mrs. Jerome, the one thing that would mean the most to me was to hear that they knew how much I loved them.” Beyond that Jerome hopes that the students loved their time learning from and performing with her. 

“I did the very best with what I had, and I hope that the program that I built is worthy of the investments and sacrifices that so many made for our little school” She is proud of the foundation she has laid and especially excited for the wide and fresh eyes that will fill her shoes.