Jack Nakano, an educator who launched the nonprofit Youth Theatre Productions in Santa Barbara in the early 1960s and later founded and was artistic director of the Hollywood-based California Youth Theatre and YouTHeatre-America!, has died. He was 75.
Nakano, whose long career as a youth-oriented theater arts guru spanned five decades and touched the lives of performers such as Jack Black and America Ferrera, died of heart failure Jan. 15 at the VA Hospital in West Los Angeles, said theatrical producer Joe Gunches, a friend.
"Jack was a tireless educator who loved musical theater and tried to inspire a love of this great American art form in his students," producer-director Taylor Hackford, who knew Nakano from his junior high and high school days in Santa Barbara, said in an e-mail. "He was a genuine Santa Barbara pioneer educator/producer."
Nakano was a performing-arts teacher at La Cumbre Junior High School in Santa Barbara in 1962 when he joined other local drama teachers to create the summer theater program that became the long-running Youth Theatre Productions in Santa Barbara.
Eric Stoltz, Anthony Edwards, Randolph Mantooth and the four Bottoms brothers -- Timothy, Joseph, Samuel and Benjamin -- are among the young students in the program in the 1960s and '70s who went on to acting careers.
"It really was my foundation for a career as a professional actor," said Timothy Bottoms, who appeared in his first Youth Theatre Production in the mid-'60s, when he was 13. "It would never have happened without Jack Nakano -- and that goes for a whole bunch of actors."
Stoltz said at least half of the 35 plays and musicals he appeared in as a teenager in Santa Barbara in the 1970s before going to college were with Nakano's Youth Theatre Productions.
"I'm one of the many people who will be forever grateful for the love and respect of theater that he engendered in so many," Stoltz said. "He was very passionate about the theater, and it affected a lot of people."
As a theater arts instructor at Santa Barbara High School from 1964 to 1978, Nakano took a new approach to student productions that captured the attention of Dan Sullivan, then The Times' drama critic.
Although Equity actors had been appearing in college productions for several seasons, Sullivan reported in 1970, "the Santa Barbara experiment marks the first time they have performed with high school actors."
