John Howrey, original member of the TAP team, returns in 2011

In December of 2002, Clay Nichols asked me if I was inter­est­ed in start­ing a board­ing camp for the arts at St. Stephen’s in the sum­mer of 2003. I was look­ing for a new project and jumped at the idea. I left his office and drove straight over to my friend, John’s house. John had music direct­ed a few shows with me and had just began a new career path as a graph­ic design­er. We had a meet­ing and came up with a plan. After many meet­ings, brochures went out, a staff was hired, plans were made and TAP Camp was born. John start­ed out as TAP Camp’s man­ag­ing direc­tor, graph­ic design­er and musi­cal direc­tor and con­tin­ued that for the first four sum­mers. He moved to Boston, Massachusetts in 2004 to study graph­ic design. John has con­tin­ued to be instru­men­tal in the suc­cess of TAP Camp from afar. As the graph­ic design­er, John has cre­at­ed beau­ti­ful print mate­ri­als every year and helped us with our mar­ket­ing efforts. He spent the bet­ter part of this year mak­ing us a new web­site and con­tin­ues to pro­vide us with beau­ti­ful materials.

When John decid­ed to go into a career as a graph­ic design­er, I wor­ried that the musi­cal artist in him would be lost. But Boston has embraced all of his many tal­ents and allowed him to flour­ish. John has been musi­cal direc­tor for near­ly a dozen musi­cals with Stoneham Theatre Company, where he has also been hired as a direc­tor on a num­ber of pro­duc­tions. He has con­tin­ued teach­ing class­es in pri­vate and group voice and musi­cal the­atre his­to­ry. John has worked as a musi­cal direc­tor for Suffolk University, Arlington Children’s Theatre, Riverside Theatre Works and he is slat­ed to work on a pro­duc­tion of Bat Boy: The Musical for the Metro Stage Company this sum­mer. This year, he was hired as the Musical Director for Sunfish, a new musi­cal, pro­duced at Stoneham Theatre.

I am very excit­ed to have John at TAP Camp this summer…as a musi­cal direc­tor, edu­ca­tor, design­er, musi­cal the­atre geek and gen­er­al artis­tic guru. I look for­ward to col­lab­o­rat­ing with him this sum­mer and I am excit­ed to see the growth of our campers after work­ing with him for three weeks.

-Ginger, TAP Artistic Director