Anything Goes — and so does Russell Schultz

Chapter · The first switch

Business lasted two weeks. Acting stuck.

Schultz treats Santa Fe rehearsal rooms like laboratories. Students who thought theatre was “extra” leave knowing it is craft — cue sheets, breath, the difference between a laugh that lands and a laugh that apologizes. That insistence did not appear overnight. It started with a kid who felt invisible until a talent-show mic told him otherwise, then a college freshman who had to argue for the same feeling in more formal language.

He went to a small liberal arts college in Iowa on a German scholarship. Acting did not look like a viable vocational path, so he started as a business major — and quietly abandoned the idea after a couple weeks of accounting. “My mind just doesn’t operate that way,” he said.

The permanent turn came after watching a classmate onstage. He switched to acting before he had “sniffed a single line of Hamlet,” then applied a businesslike discipline to the new major anyway. “I had to explain to my parents about the decision, but after that first acting class in the spring of my freshman year, I never looked back. I think they could also sense that I might be a good teacher.”

By junior year the faculty trusted him enough to mentor underclassmen in the college’s acting pedagogy — an unofficial T.A. role at a school without a graduate program. “I began to develop my own teaching approach,” he said. That early switch still shapes how he talks to Santa Fe students who arrive unsure whether they belong in a rehearsal room. He tells them what the stage told him: size is optional; presence is not.

Chapter · The Fine Arts building

Rehearsal as pedagogy

At Santa Fe, Schultz is Associate Professor of Theatre — the same mentoring instinct he practiced as an undergraduate T.A., now aimed at students who may be taking Theatre Appreciation between nursing labs, or who walked into Fine Arts looking for an elective and found a vocation instead.

Anything Goes asks a cast for the hardest kind of comedy: ease that only arrives after repetition. Porter’s songs leave no place to hide. Entrances have to land. Harmonies have to lock. A tossed-off line still needs a spine. Schultz’s classrooms treat that pressure as the point. Attention is not a personality trait; it is a craft students practice until the house can feel it.

He still talks about mentorship the way he talks about scene work — as a relationship that outlasts a semester. Keep one faculty relationship after you graduate, he tells students. The production photos that follow are not decoration for that idea. They are the syllabus made visible: tape marks on the floor, sheet music on a stand, a company learning to listen between cues.

Between portraits and production stills is the quieter work: notes after a run, a student who finally stops rushing the laugh, a faculty artist who still treats every call-back headshot energy as a teaching tool. The next stretch of the story walks four of those frames — faculty artist, rehearsal, opening night, offstage — without leaving the campus that keeps him here.

Chapter · The Washington call

They didn’t tell him the project — or the role

The film work that put Schultz behind a prosthetic nose and historically accurate false teeth did not arrive as a glamorous open call. It circled back to graduate school. In his first semester at the University of Florida he played the title role in George Washington’s Boy, written by actor Ted Lange — better known as Isaac from The Love Boat — alongside a classmate who would later direct for Sight & Sound Theatres, the Pennsylvania company behind A Great Awakening.

Years later an unsolicited email asked whether he would audition for an undisclosed part. “They didn’t tell me what the project was, or even the role,” Schultz said. “I assumed they were just wanting a self-tape demo but said ‘We want you to come up to Pennsylvania.’ It was a full screen test with makeup, costume, performing into a camera. About a month later, they offered me the role.”

He returned for fittings, molds, and impressions — prosthetics for Washington’s nose and hand-crafted teeth — then shuttled back and forth to wrap his scenes. The private premiere in December 2025 conflicted with Santa Fe finals. He skipped the premiere. The students came first.

“I haven’t even seen the film yet,” he said. “I’m just as eager to see it as everybody else.”

Chapter · Into the dentures

Virginia vowels, sheep teeth, and a soft-talking president

Playing Washington asked for the same deep dive Schultz asks of students: research until the body believes it. He studied what a late-1780s Virginia accent might sound like coming through the first president’s famous store-bought dentures — a combination of sheep and human teeth with integrated springs.

“He was a quiet man, perhaps because of the teeth,” Schultz explained. “I got my prosthetic teeth the day before the first scenes, and when I put them in, everything clicked. There were reports from his inaugural address that Washington was a soft talker who no one could easily hear. According to the directors, I look a lot like him — they were always comparing me to $1 bills.”

Teacher that he is, he also hears a civics lesson in the film’s larger argument. “Of great concern to Washington was ‘Now that we’ve got this, how do we keep it?’” Schultz said. The Founders were imperfect, the Convention a grind of disagreement, the Constitution an imperfect compromise nobody fully loved. “But it shows that even we — like they were in the late 1780s — can be very opposed to each other, and still hammer out something we believe in that is much bigger than ourselves.”

Anything Goes is a campus musical that refuses to treat joy as optional — and Schultz refuses to treat joy as accidental. The production only works if students rehearse like the laughs are earned. That standard is what he brings from every earlier chapter: Dallas stages, Iowa classrooms, New York detours, UF voice work, and a film set that asked him to disappear into history without disappearing from Santa Fe.