At 8 a.m., Schenley High School's auditorium is already too hot, and the stage sizzles while 44 teenagers stretch and kick to George Benson singing "On Broadway."

Alyssa Cwanger, Post-Gazette "My kids ... give me everything I ask for and a little bit more," says Roger Babusci, "Mr. B," who is directing "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat," his last play at Schenley High School. Click photo for larger image. Show at Schenley Play at Schenley Schenley High School in Oakland will present "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" at 8 p.m. tomorrow, Friday and Saturday and May 4, 5 and 6. Tickets are $7 and can be purchased in the lobby before the performance.

"You take your body with you when you go on stage," says Roger Babusci, conjurer of a magic that has garnered 74 nominations and won 30 Gene Kelly Awards, which honor the best in high school musical theater.

After 40 years in the Pittsburgh public schools, Mr. Babusci -- activities director and teacher of English, poetry and drama -- is retiring along with his Ralph Kramden-esque roar of "Quiet!" that can silence a theater full of teenagers. (Perhaps he came by it honestly -- his father owned a bus company and later worked as a bus driver.)

"Mr. B" is one of two local high school directors to stage "A Chorus Line" with 17 students. Eight members of that cast went on to perform professionally. In 1983, Schenley's cast presented "Ain't Misbehavin' " at the governor's mansion when Babusci was named Pennsylvania's Teacher of the Year.

This is Mr. B's last stint in the director's chair, partly because he's turning 64 in August. "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat," his last show, opens tomorrow. The score is a musical buffet that includes a number sung a la Elvis Presley, a country-and-western ditty, calypso rhythm with a steel drum, rap and a French art song.

So, this farewell will include one final photo session with a grateful cast, one last round of rehearsals, one colorful T-shirt with performers' names, one more opening night as producer and director in charge and one curtain call of a cast party for one singular sensation of a man.

Alyssa Cwanger, Post-Gazette Babusci talks to stage managers Brittany Bova and Megan Bova during a rehearsal. Click photo for larger image.

Immediately after the last performance on May 6, alumni of past shows will greet Mr. B at a reception wearing stickers that say, "I was part of the magic."

But right now, Mr. B is busy watching the show's final dance number, telling the cast, "I want even more hip-hop at the beginning, more MTV, more BET."

When he can't hear actors singing the words to songs, he asks musicians to play more softly, remarking, "Periodically, I have to remind them that it's not a band concert."

Seated near the stage is Miss Kelly McKrell, a trim, energetic 110-pound teacher. As Mr. Babusci's successor, she held it all together once rehearsals began in February. That's because Mr. B. grumped his way through weeks of tests and rest at UPMC Shadyside in February and March after casting the production in January. He has already survived four heart attacks and bouts of congestive heart failure.

"When she directs, it's like watching myself direct 20 years ago," Mr. Babusci said.

He landed his best role 34 years ago when Schenley students asked him to produce a play in 1972. The comedy, "Five on the Blackhand Side," lost a few bucks but students learned how to build sets and carried them up Centre Avenue to Herron Hill Junior High auditorium. Admission was $1.50.

Next came "Tambourines to Glory" and "To Be Young, Gifted and Black." The first musical was "Purlie," and since then, what Mr. B has learned about teenagers, lighting, sound, choreography and costumes would fill several stage trunks.

Launching a legacy

Mr. B.'s passion for theater launched many students into professional careers in theater.

Alumni often appear at rehearsals and greet Mr. B., but others are far-flung. Kris Storey, who studied modern dance on scholarship at Juilliard, is in Berlin, Germany, playing a hyena in "The Lion King." Matt Tatman travels the United States as an electrician on stage crews. His sister, Leah, is on this year's crew.

Alison Paleos did not know a flat from stage right when she began working behind the scenes at Schenley.

As assistant stage manager for "West Side Story" in 1996, "I had a blast. I felt like I finally enjoyed something and that I was good at it. That was a big first," said Ms. Paleos, who earned a degree in stage management from Carnegie Mellon University in 2001 and is managing City Theatre's current production of "Talking Heads."

Tiffany Ellis Butts, who studied arts management at Yale after leaving Schenley, is director of marketing and public relations at Aaron Davis Hall in Harlem, where she lives with her husband and newborn son.

"I have so much respect for what he taught us and how serious he was about it. You've got to be committed to it. You've got to practice. You've got to put your mind to it and think about what you're doing."

Alumni recall that now and again, Mr. B. lobbed a 2-by-4 into the balcony, meant as a wake-up call for inattentive lighting and sound technicians. Or, fueled by frustration, he stormed from the back of the theater to insist that actors could not miss cues.

"One year during tech week, I threw the student choreographer out of the show. She was in the back, breakdancing," Mr. Babusci recalled.

But when rehearsal ended and everyone gathered on stage, Mr. B sweetened constructive criticism with encouragement for 20 minutes.

"It made everyone come together. You realized how many people were involved and what it took to put the show together. He was the glue," Ms. Paleos said.

A visual, oral art

Besides directing musical theater, Mr. B. has stuck with golf and photography, especially capturing Schenley's basketball team on film.

He grew up in Lawrenceville, where his mother, Wanda, worked as a cook at West Penn Hospital's coffee shop and loved oldies music, church and bingo. He acted in plays at Central Catholic High School and studied set design with Henry Heymann, the retired University of Pittsburgh drama professor whose name graces a theater on the school's Oakland campus.

"What Henry Heymann didn't know about set design wasn't worth knowing," Mr. B said, adding that theater is "a visual as well as an oral art. It was like having Sam Hazo for a poetry class," he said, referring to his longtime friend and mentor.

After earning a bachelor's degree in English at Duquesne University in 1964, Mr. B finished a master of arts in teaching at Duquesne in 1967. Early in his career, he won praise for his ability to make grammar interesting to high school students.

"I didn't realize I was learning until the class was over," one student told him.

His own daughter, Alison Babusci, Schenley class of '88, also participated in plays and relished rehearsals during spring break.

"Those were the first days of sunshine. You'd wear your crazy dance clothes down to the Dairy Queen on Centre Avenue," she said.

Now a teacher and storyteller in the Pittsburgh public schools, Ms. Babusci said Schenley "was a place where we all mixed it up and there was color-blind casting. If a white guy was the king, a black girl could be queen."

More recently, Mr. B cast Kerry Allen, a young black student, as Irving Berlin, a Jew from New York's Lower East Side in the 2002 production of "The Melody Lingers On."

At a rehearsal this year, Ms. Babusci arrived with special glitter paint for the sets. For a moment, Mr. B frets.

"There are schools who rent their sets from New York. How am I going to compete with that?" he wonders.

But he grins broadly while talking with twin sisters Megan and Brittany Bova, the perky technicians in training who are figuring out how to hang Joseph's dreamcoat.

And his pride in students' initiative and ingenuity is evident.

"My kids do this on their own. They'll give me everything I ask for and a little bit more," he said.

The show's choreographer is Tony Dixon, a tall, wiry, Schenley graduate who played the title role in "Barnum" when he was a high school student.

Since 1989, Mr. Dixon, who moves with a cat-like grace, has worked with Mr. B and won several Kelly Awards. He runs the dance department at Rogers Middle School for the Creative and Performing Arts and this is his last year at Schenley, too.

"He always tells the kids he's the oldest living Schenley senior," Mr. Babusci joked. Adds his daughter, "He's also the son my Dad never had."

As she has for years, Vernell Lillie will be there to see Schenley's students perform.

Mrs. Lillie, founder and producing director of Kuntu Repertory Theater, said Mr. B "has a quality that I knew from the Deep South. He knows you can learn and he translates that to you in an instinctive kind of way without lecture, without exercises. Somehow ... he says to the youngsters who come in his presence, 'I respect you. This is what I expect of you and I will not accept anything else.' " Mrs. Lillie added, "These students are developing skills that will carry them into life and they know that. They know that to be a child of Mr. B's places you somewhere very special on the ladder toward success."