Announcer 0:00
This is a KU NV studios original program.

Danielle Hartnett 0:04
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Keith McMillen 0:16
Hello and welcome to focus on Olli. Olli is a program at UNLV, dedicated to retired or semi retired individuals who remain engaged and active in civic activities and lifelong learning. Holly is the Usher Lifelong Learning Institute at UNLV. Holly is made possible by support from the Bernard Osher Foundation, established by philanthropists Bernard and Barbara ocher with a mission to support lifelong learning, higher education and the arts. This series is designed to give you an in depth look at the Olli program, and encourage you to join in the fun and welcome back to focus on Olli today, we're going to look into some of our classes and activities involving musical theater and motion pictures, both very popular topics. Here at Olli to talk about musical theater, we have Bruce Ewing, who has had a career in musical theater. He's appeared in forever, plaid Phantom, that fat pack. He's lived in Las Vegas for many years, and his love of musical theater is evident in his enthusiastic approach to teaching others all about it, offering insight into movies we have Danielle Hartnett, she has a degree in film from USC School of cinema. She's a published film reviewer with a special interest in the Hollywood blacklist. On a personal note, her class on the Hollywood 10 that I took a few semesters ago was very eye opening. And last but not least is Blaine Benedict, an ollie student since 2018 he spent 20 years in the gaming business here in Las Vegas, left it to become the executive director of the Red Rock Canyon interpretive Association. When he retired from that, he found ollie, and we'll find out how he did that a little later. Welcome to focus on Ollie for all of you. Thanks, Keith, hi. We're going to start with Bruce. Yes, sir, what got you into musical theater?

Bruce Ewing 2:25
I was horrible at sports. I my dad. I played with my dad's baseball team for three years, and I couldn't throw, couldn't catch, couldn't hit, and it was my dad's suggestion that I find another hobby, and he brought me to my very first theatrical audition when I was 12, and it took off. I mean, the bug bit then, and I just spent my entire life in theater and in music.

Keith McMillen 2:49
Fantastic. Yeah, now you've been here for a number of years. I think when you first came to Las Vegas, it was like for a six week gig.

Bruce Ewing 2:58
Yes, CEO was only gonna stay for I wanted six weeks. If we finally negotiated that I'd be here for six months, and then I was out. But the truth of the matter is, I got to Las Vegas, and I knew it was my home immediately. I just it was, it was almost a spiritual moment that I had that made me feel like I'm supposed to be here, and I've stayed. It's now been 29 years.

Keith McMillen 3:21
Wow. Yeah, fantastic. We are lucky to have you here. Oh, thanks, Danielle, you have had a long interest in movies. I mean, you studied them in college, yeah. How did that come about?

Danielle Hartnett 3:35
That's an interesting question. And I think the answer to that is one Saturday night, it was already nine o'clock at night, and my mother came in and said, What are you doing? And I said, Well, I'm watching this movie. And it was James Cagney and Angels with Dirty Faces. And my mom smiled at me and said, Well, you can stay up for that. And it was love from there.

Keith McMillen 4:01
Fantastic. How did you discover Ollie?

Danielle Hartnett 4:06
Well, you know, I retired in 2017 and when I came out here to be with my family, I actually didn't know a soul. So I started going to lunch groups, and it was there that I met an ollie student, and I had already attended Olli in California, so when I found out there was a program here, I just couldn't, I just couldn't pass it up. And the first class I ever took was actually with the late Keith Bauer, his hitch clock Hitchcock class, and he was the one who actually encouraged me to become a teacher.

Keith McMillen 4:41
Fantastic. Now, you had an unusual experience. I think they the staff at Olli asked you to teach a class, but not at the Olli campus.

Danielle Hartnett 4:52
Oh, yes, that's true. I was actually invited to speak as a guest lecturer. At the Carnegie heights program, which is one of our satellite programs for the department. And people may not be aware of this, but we have in person classes, we have virtual classes, but there are also classes out at community locations that people can attend, and they're all throughout the county.

Keith McMillen 5:22
Yes, fantastic. Bruce, you discovered Ali, I think, in a relatively unusual way you were, you were working on a special project.

Blaine Benedict 5:35
Yes, I, in my role as a nonprofit executive director, we were partners with the Bureau of Land Management out at Red Rock Canyon and work closely with the UNLV public lands Institute, which was set up to provide support and assistance to people working on the public lands, and their office and staff were located in the old paradise campus. And I had several meetings there over a period of time, and would wander around the old paradise school, and I saw these brochures and catalogs one day, and it talked about the offerings at this thing called Olli, and I did some reading on it, and looked at the class schedule for a particular fall, and There were a couple of classes that really piqued my interest, so I signed up for it, and that was in 2018 and now in 2025 I'm still attending Olli classes.

Keith McMillen 6:53
Interesting. What keeps you coming back?

Blaine Benedict 6:57
Well as now I'm retired, I have a little more time, but the offerings of the of the different offerings, are so interesting and so varied, and the teachers have, over the years, have become so talented and so skilled that it's something I want to do to continue my intellectual growth. There's always something there that I think, wow, I wish I would have studied this earlier. I didn't have time. I was working raising children, whatever. And so I sign up for these classes, and they've become, they've become part of my life,

Keith McMillen 7:45
and I'm sure that's true for a lot of us. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, Bruce, yes, you are. I think one of our more popular classes is, at least right now in American musical theater. But you also put a small expedition together for 40 or 50 of your closest friends to go to New York to see Broadway shows, right?

Bruce Ewing 8:12
Well, that's part of the great part about Olli is it's not just a learning environment, but it's a social environment. So really, these trips that I've taken to New York. It's just a group of friends that we've all met at Ali and all met in the classes, and it's people that want to go and experience New York and Broadway trips. So I just put them together, and we started with about 40 the first time, 50 the second trip, 62, the third trip, and now we're back down to 40 for the fourth trip. But it's just a bunch of people, and we all just go together, and we enjoy five Broadway shows during six days, and we got the museums and dinners and breakfasts, and it's just a good time.

Keith McMillen 8:46
And you help arrange tickets for various shows. So

Bruce Ewing 8:50
I do all the travel planning, yeah, although all that and all the anything i and anything extra that I can help people plan on their own time, but I plan all the tickets in the hotel rooms and the flights. And it's a blast. I love doing that for

Keith McMillen 9:04
him. Exciting. Thanks. Anything special coming up that we should know about? I know the season for the Smith Center has just been announced. Yeah.

Bruce Ewing 9:13
So we, we actually, within my class, we look at everything that's coming up locally. Well, we look at what's happening every week in Broadway, what's happening locally, and just keep an eye on it all as well as then we go back into history and learn more about the development that led us to today. So there's lots always going on. The fun part about being in Las Vegas is we have the Smith Center with the Broadway tours, but we also have, like, amazing community theater. We have the Majestic Theater downtown, which does so much immersive experimental theater, and we have signature players up in Summerlin doing all sorts of things at Summerlin library. And we have so many different cabarets and performers. So I try to keep an eye on what's really kind of fun and worthy, and I try to bring those up in class and our. Our our membership at Ali, love to go out and do things. So it's it's great. We're adding a lot to the audiences of Las Vegas.

Keith McMillen 10:06
Fantastic. Danielle, you have concentrated especially on, I don't want to call it historical events and stuff, but you'd like looking at cinema in terms of US history. I

Danielle Hartnett 10:21
always view film as being a historical document. You can't ever take a film out of its context in terms of the politics, the social history. And I really hate that phrase, that's only a movie. Like I never look at a movie as being only a movie. There's always some story behind the story, and I find that even though my primary area of interest is in the Hollywood black list, there is so much that can be learned in in movements that are adjacent to that. So I've taught, for instance, a class on International Film Noir. I taught a class on Italian Neo realism, which greatly influenced film noir itself. So it just seems to me that a lot of my classes are just based on where I'm at intellectually in a given moment. I've never taught the same class twice, because my interests always seem to be broadening. And one of the reasons I love being a teacher at Olli is because I'm not only an instructor, but I'm also a student at the same time, because I do so much research for my classes, I'm actually teaching myself new things. So the more varied and different and new classes I can put together, the more enriching the experience is for me personally. So I get great feedback, not only from the students themselves, but then I feel like I've accomplished something on an intellectual level.

Keith McMillen 12:04
Blaine, are there particular class areas that you like to concentrate on?

Blaine Benedict 12:10
Well, it a lot depends on what's offered. I like to think that I have a lot of different interests, but I'll tell you how things can develop at Olli, when I was a boy, I was a big fan of TV, westerns, Roy Rogers, Bonanza, etc. And one of the classes I saw offered at Olli, taught by Danielle, was one on Paladin. Now, when I watched Paladin, I was a boy, maybe early teens at the latest, and I was interested in the nice hotel that he lived at and his really cool Western outfit and his hat and his gun and his horse, but I took Danielle's class and learned that that wasn't Paladin. Paladin was a very complex character who fought issues like racial prejudice, class Class disruptions, or inequalities, moral ambiguity, those types of things. And so to watch these different episodes, not watching his horse and his gun slinging, but watching him deal with the other and the outsider, was such a powerful experience for me that it's really hard to explain, and ever since that time, I've been a fan of Danielle's because all her classes teach things about film that the average person is not aware of, and Danielle probably knows this. I still watch Paladin on YouTube, but I'm a very much more knowledgeable viewer now.

Danielle Hartnett 14:10
And explain that made my day.

Blaine Benedict 14:14
It's incredibly enjoyable and intellectually stimulating. So here I am, you know, in my mid to late 70s, watching a show that I first watched 60 some years ago, but getting more out of it. So, how can, how can you beat that as as an educational experience

Keith McMillen 14:34
there? There's a gold star for Daniel, is that approach you take in a lot of things is to look underneath the surface.

Danielle Hartnett 14:44
It's the approach I take with everything, with everything I teach. So for instance, I taught a class on filmmakers in France in the mid to late 30s. They were Social. Actually committed. And in order to explain why that movement is so important, you have to look at the politics of it, what was going on at that period of time in France, in Europe, and how these filmmakers tried to promote a specific agenda. And I find that even when I'm teaching something like television, that I wouldn't pick a class of any type if I didn't have a so what to it? People can watch movies at home. They can do that on their own. But if I can't bring something more to the table, I feel like I'm not doing my best for that day.

Keith McMillen 15:46
Interesting. Bruce and I have been taking your your course on American musical theater, and you mentioned show today, that is, if I remember correctly, it's a revival, but you're warned. The show comes with warnings, big warnings,

Bruce Ewing 16:05
yeah, and it will just appeared at Smith Center last month, I guess it was. And so it's called parade, and it was a revival. It was written in the late 90s by Jason Robert Brown, but it deals with a story from a true story of Leo Frank, who was a Jewish gentleman that he and his wife had moved to outside of Atlanta, Georgia, and his entire story, he had a company there, and there was a girl that was raped and murdered within his factory, and he was blamed for it. And basically it was the entire case against him really had to do with their anti semitism. And scary thing about it is they they first found him guilty, his wife worked incredibly hard to try to clear his name, and almost did have it cleared when people stormed the jails in 1918 and killed him. They killed him, and then his name was not actually cleared until 2018 but the interesting thing about it that I talked about in class is that this show came back, I believe it was on Broadway in 2022 and there were white supremacists that showed up outside the theater and to the people that were online, they were harassing the people going in to see this show. So this anti semitism that was so strong in the early 1900s is back and present in horrible ways, and that this show in particular, if anybody ever gets a chance to see it, it's, it's, so it's such an important story, just to make people aware of the dangers of it in the fact that history keeps repeating itself, unless we do something to stop the cycle. So yeah, that was, I mean, that I think, is one of the most important musicals I've taught in the past few years.

Keith McMillen 17:58
Yeah, and certainly not what people would expect, because when they think of musicals, they think light, airy, funny, singing, dancing. And when

Bruce Ewing 18:05
you walk into the theater, it's a beautiful set with lots of American flags, because, you know, the parade is coming to town and the holiday and that sort of thing. So it throws you. And like I said, with that show, it's not there was one woman in our class who said, I can't go see a show that's going to make me feel bad. I have to feel happy when I leave the theater and I said, Don't go see the show. It'll make you think. It'll make you feel but it's definitely an important piece. Yeah,

Keith McMillen 18:35
excellent. What anything in this last semester impress you? Wayne,

Blaine Benedict 18:40
well, Danielle's class was great as usual.

Keith McMillen 18:45
What was the topic? I remember it vaguely, but

Blaine Benedict 18:49
these were films about World War Two, but not from the American perspective, that from foreign perspectives. Yes, yes,

Danielle Hartnett 19:02
we we showed one American film noir, but the premise was films made about World War Two in the aftermath of World War Two, when it was still a fresh phenomenon, and we studied films from seven different countries.

Keith McMillen 19:19
Wow, amazing. But

Blaine Benedict 19:22
that wasn't my only class. One of the great classes they have Keith is so soapbox, which has different speakers all year long on different topics such as immigration and public education, all sorts of topics that are in the news. Recently, we had former governor sisolak address the group. Very interesting. And then the other class I'm taking. Working this semester is professor's choice, where we get different members of the faculty each week to come in and talk about their areas of interest, which is really amazing, because it helps us learn about all the different things that go on at UNLV, and it helps make the Olli students feel more engaged with what's going on on campus.

Keith McMillen 20:30
And for those of you who are aware of K, U, N, V, whose studios we are in right now, the director of this program, Dr Ashton Ridley, will be a guest on professor's choice in the fall. Oh, nice. So we want to learn more about all kinds of things. Danielle, do you have a favorite director? We talked you, I'm not. I didn't really mean director. You did a class just last semester on Orson Welles, yes, I did, and he's a director and an actor and a writer, and what else can you tell us about him in a minute and a half?

Danielle Hartnett 21:10
Oh, he was a very complex character that very quickly became an outsider in Hollywood. And I only focused on the films that he actually directed, because he directed most of them, finding money himself. So he was an independent producer, on top of being an actor, a writer and a director, and let's not forget radio. Keith, how can we forget radio sitting here

Keith McMillen 21:37
the invasion from Mars? Yes shook us to to the ground, yes. So what I know there is an event coming up shortly, Bruce, that you're looking forward to. It's the Tonys.

Bruce Ewing 21:50
I love, the Tony Awards. And so basically throughout my class, all year long, we keep focused on what's happening in New York and where, where it's leading to in the Tony Awards. So, and much of the history that I look at, many of the videos that I can look at a Broadway shows, are from old Tony Awards. So really, all of that wealth of entertainment is at my fingertips to teach this course. But yeah, we look at it every year, and so it always happens in in June every year. So it's, it's, it's, it's exciting for me, and I like to get our students interested in and excited about it, so that when the awards come up, it's they're familiar with what they're going to see and who they're going to see, and so, and we throw a big party, and, you know that's that just makes it even more

Keith McMillen 22:36
fun. Yes, good day. Exactly, more fun is always good. Exactly, I'm in favor of that. Well, thank you. Thank you all for anyone listening. There's going to be a little blurb about Olli when we're finished here, but I want to give you a heads up in awe. In August on the 19th Olli is going to have its fall open house at our Maryland Parkway building. It's 4350, South Maryland Parkway, directly on the east side of Maryland Parkway from the main campus. The open house will give you a chance to come in see the facility. Talk to our teachers, talk to some students, to learn more about what's going on to see if this is a program you might want to get interested in. So thank you all. Focus on Olli. We'll be back next month with another topic, and I have no idea what it's going to be. Thanks for listening to focus on Olli. There are several ways to get more information. Our web address is Ali o, l, l, i.unlv.edu You may also email us at Olli at UNLV. That's Ollie O, L, L, I, A, T, U, n, l, V, at sign unlv.edu, you can also just give us a call at 7028. 9530, 9533 94 Monday through Friday, between the hours of eight and five. Except, of course, on university holidays, you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai