New education director brings wealth of experience to Los Altos Stage Company
Kristin Walter started her career at Sunnyvale's California Theatre Center
Judging by her impressive theater background, Los Altos Stage Company picked the right person in Kristin Walter to become its new education director and help develop its youth program.
Walter's experience includes running conservatories for California Theatre Center, a Sunnyvale-based company that shuttered in 2017 after 41 years. She also served as the education director at Peninsula Youth Theatre in Mountain View. For the past 22 years, she's been the middle school theater teacher at Castilleja School in Palo Alto.
“After spending all that time at Castilleja, I was very much ready for a new challenge,” she says. “It's a perfect use of my skills set and it's part-time, which means I'll still be able to direct adult shows, perform and write.”
“We're thrilled to have Kristin join us as our new education director,” says LASC's executive artistic director Gary Landis. “She has a long and distinguished career in arts education and is widely respected throughout the local arts and education communities. We couldn't have hoped for a more qualified person to advance our youth programs and plan for future growth, hopefully including a new neighborhood playhouse in downtown Los Altos.”
Walter was already a familiar face to Los Altos Stage Company (LASC) audiences. In the past several years, she's appeared in LASC's productions of “Company,” “Dead Man's Cell Phone,” “Admissions,” “Steel Magnolias” and “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime.”
In the latter production, Walter shared the stage with her son, Max Mahle, who played Christopher; she played his teacher. Walter's
husband, Chris Mahle, is also an actor.
The couple met in 1996, when they both appeared in a production of “Little Shop of Horrors” on an island in the middle of Lake Erie. Since then, the two of them have only performed together one other time, at Mountain View's Pear Theatre during its annual “Pear Slices” short play program.
With both parents being actors, Walter says Max was “genetically doomed to do theater.” He earned a bachelor's degree in acting from Roosevelt University,
and he'll be playing Harold in LASC's production of “Harold and Maude” in April.
Chris Mahle frequently performs at Palo Alto Players (he was recently seen in that company's production of “The Play that Goes Wrong”) but he, too, has a day job: He teaches middle school theater in the Palo Alto Unified School District.
Walter graduated from Santa Clara University, where she majored in theater with an acting emphasis. While there, she performed in many shows and says
Tom Stoppard's “On the Razzle” was her favorite.
Her first job out of college was at California Theatre Center, where she performed locally in Sunnyvale, and spent a year touring with Missoula Children's Theatre, performing Pinocchio with schoolchildren all over the country.
She started writing plays when she was Peninsula Youth Theatre's education director. “I helped with adaptations of children's books, but they were hard to find so I decided to try my hand at writing some,” she recalls.
She's proud that she's now had four of her adaptations published by Samuel French (now Concord Theatricals): “The Selfish Giant,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “Rapunzel” and “The Last of the Dragons.”
As for her new position at LASC, she is chock-full of ideas that she hopes to implement. “I would love to create more classes for all ages during the school year, both after school and on weekends,” she says. “I'm also interested in starting a teen board of high school students who are interested in teaching younger students, interning with the adult shows, and helping to create a community of teen artists in Los Altos.
“It would be great if we could do things like storytelling at the library, singing at street fairs — things that will raise the profile of the youth theater,” she adds.