Ray Dumont doesn’t like to say that he has to go to work. He says he gets to go to work.
The new executive director at the Academy of Music in Northampton stepped into the role on July 1, replacing outgoing executive director Debra J’Anthony, who retired after 18 years in the position.
“I literally live the performing arts 24/7. That is my job, and I don’t take that lightly,” he said. “That’s a really big privilege on my part. And I get to do this every day with amazing people, and my life has introduced me to so many amazing people and places and events and ideas, and that’s what the arts does. I wake up every day saying, ‘I am darn lucky.’”
The Academy recently held a party for J’Anthony to celebrate her tenure and introduce Dumont to the community.
“I’m a little spoiled. Debra is handing me a company that’s very healthy, and now … she can drive by this building every day and say, ‘I did that.’ That’s amazing, and it’s well-earned, but I also understand, after 18 years, you’re ready to go, ‘OK, somebody else — somebody tap in,’” Dumont said.
Dumont, 59, came to the role from Maine, his home state. There, he worked for the Maine State Music Theatre (MSMT) for more than 25 seasons, including four years as managing director from 1999 to 2003.
“I’ve been a producer, director, choreographer, educator, actor, dancer, you name it, and I tend to bring everyone along with me. I tend to be very much the collaborative manager. The buck stops with me, the decision stops with me, but I need to know what the people who are actually doing the jobs feel about things,” he said.
One of his proudest accomplishments at MSMT, he said, was launching a capital campaign to create a “state-of-the-art production facility” after a period of “renting literally everything,” including space. With the money they raised, he and his staff renovated an old bus garage, turning it into “scene shops, office space, rehearsal halls, costume shop, the whole nine yards,” Dumont said.
“That capital project was massive. I had never undertaken anything like that, and I say ‘I never undertook it’ — it was a team. There were a few times I was white-knuckling through this whole thing. It was hard. But it trained me to understand capital projects,” he said.
In a building like the Academy of Music, which is more than a century old and has undergone a number of renovations since its creation, understanding all of the steps and processes to create capital projects and capital campaigns is vital, he noted: “You can’t wake up some morning and say, ‘I’m having a capital campaign.’”
“Everything I’ve ever done has prepared me, in some way, for this,” he added. “We are the sum total of every experience we ever had.”
Dumont recalled an experience from his acting life that also left an impression: a production of “Hello, Dolly!” in which the whole cast had the stomach flu.
“It was wretched. The color drained out of our faces. Nobody called out of shows back then. Now, people call out for a hangnail,” he said.
Dumont was the show’s dance captain, and one night, he took a poster and wrote down which cast members could sit out of certain musical numbers so they could run offstage and deal with their sickness.
“I said, ‘OK, you are out of ‘It Takes A Woman.’ You and you are out of ‘[Put On Your] Sunday Clothes.’ You’re not in ‘Dancing,’ and we’ll just fill the gaps,’” he said. By the time the cast got to the second-act dance sequence “The Waiter’s Gallop,” there were only “four of us who could actually do anything, so I just kept covering everybody because I knew everybody’s track. And I didn’t have time to reassign, so I was like, ‘I’ll do it.’”
That night was especially notable for another reason: their director had flown in to see the show after months away from the production. As cast members lay facedown on the green room’s linoleum floor to break their fevers, the director came in.
“He goes, ‘I’m so sorry you guys are so sick. … I’m gonna tell you something, and you’re gonna be mad at me, but I’m right and you’re wrong.’ He said, ‘Um, there’s two thousand people out there, we’re sold out today, and they don’t care,’” Dumont recalled. “And he was absolutely right. They don’t care. They bought a ticket; they want to see a show. You know what? We gave them a show. We gave them a hell of a show.”
“Mind you, we should be a little more cognizant of our health,” he said. “But we all knew it was just one of those things, and so we all did it, and by the time we got to the end of it, I think all the sweating actually made us feel better because we were burning things off. But I’ll never forget that day. It was just the craziest day.”
More recently, Dumont also served as the executive director for another Maine venue, The Public Theatre, for two and a half years.
“I would not have chosen to leave The Public but for the fact that this was an opportunity I felt like I needed to explore,” Dumont said.
One of his now-former colleagues will be moving into the role, which Dumont appreciates: “He’s gonna be amazing. … His ideas are really good, and this is when it should happen. I did my work for those two and a half years to get us to a certain point, and now he’s in just the right position to jump.”
Though Dumont has spent most of his life in Maine, this is not his first time in Massachusetts. In 1988, he graduated from what was then called the Boston University School of Management (now the Boston University Questrom School of Business), where he majored in finance and marketing.
Since moving to Northampton, he’s enjoyed getting to know a different part of the state. He’s tried most of the restaurants on Main Street, and at all of them, he said, the service has been great. On a visit to Northampton Brewery, for example, “Everybody was so nice. I felt like I was meeting up with friends. It was so wonderful. Everywhere we go, it’s been like that.”
It also helps that he’s an extrovert.
“When I was younger, I was a little shyer. I’m not shy anymore. I can meet people. My fiancée jokes about me making friends everywhere I go. I do! And I don’t do it insincerely. I actually am thrilled to meet new people,” he said.
As Dumont looks ahead to upcoming work at the Academy, he wants audiences to know that the venue is “not trying to reinvent any kind of wheel. The Academy will still bring the greatest of music and theater and dance here.” He does, however, want to increase the musical theater programming that the Academy offers and for the theater to further develop its identity while being able to collaborate with other local arts organizations. A future capital campaign might be to create an off-site rehearsal space “where we can produce in-house without taking the [Academy] theater offline for two weeks,” he said – “but we’re not there yet. That’s not a two-month thing.”
Still, Dumont doesn’t need to wait for a distant future to find fulfillment in his new role.
“It’s a big decision to start a whole new job when you’re almost 60,” he said, “but I’m not retiring at 65. That’s not happening.” With this role, “I needed to find something that would make me joyful every day. … You want to have an impact on something or somebody. And I feel like here, I can actually do that collectively with our team, and I feel like we can do some really good work.”
For more information about the Academy of Music, visit aomtheatre.com.
