Mrs. K's curtain call: The life and death of Karin Krenek at Donovan Catholic

TOMS RIVER - Three years ago, Karin Krenek, the Donovan Catholic High School drama director, had another of her brilliant ideas idea while planning the December musical, “White Christmas.”

Adapted from the 1951 film starring Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney and Danny Kaye, it’s about a pair of Army buddies-turned-song-and-dance duo who find themselves in rural Vermont, where they discover that their former commanding officer, now retired, is the owner of a quaint old inn on its last legs due to a lack of snow. To help the poor guy out, they put on a holiday extravaganza, attended by the general's former troops.

Krenek's wheels were spinning. What if, she wondered, we got some local veterans to come up to the stage for the final scene and join the cast in singing “White Christmas”?

As it happened, Krenek helped organize a Veterans Day breakfast that November in the school cafeteria. During the event, she pitched the idea to the scores of vets who attended, hoping to snag a half-dozen or so willing recruits.

Clearly, she underestimated her persuasive powers. “Every single person who had been there emailed her, telling her what nights they could appear,” recalled her son and longtime co-director, Michael Krenek.

The nights of the performances, vets young and old waited for their cue, then dutifully made their way to the foot of the stage, some with canes and walkers, for a moving finale. You can watch it at the 2:48:30 mark in this YouTube video.

Talking to those closest to her, you get the sense that being around Karin Krenek made you feel as if you'd been swept up into one of those old movies, the kind where Mickey Rooney or Judy Garland says, "Hey, let's put on a show!"

"Just ride the wave," was one of Krenek's sayings, and for the dozen years she ran Donovan Catholic's highly touted drama program, students, colleagues, parents and others who wandered into her orbit and soon found themselves painting sets, stapling programs or performing on stage, did precisely that, and wound up loving every minute of it.

A Donovan parent (all four of her children graduated from the school), Krenek, 65, of Toms River, devoted the better part of her life to the 700-student school, which is part of St. Joseph's Parish. Known as "Mrs. K" and "Momma K," many regarded her as the heart and soul of Donovan Catholic.

“She wasn't just a director to me. She was really like a mom to all of us. She made us all feel special,” said Mario Gallardo, 18, a recently graduated senior who had the lead in this year’s spring musical, “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”

The Toms River teen says he felt like an outcast as a shy, arts-loving freshman until he walked into the first-floor Learning Commons that doubled as Krenek’s heavily knicknacked rec room, and found a second home. Countless students and alumni can tell a similar story.

“She believed in the kids,” said JoAnn D’Anton, the school's director of marketing, and one of Krenek's closest friends.

“‘No student left behind,’ was her motto. The kid who sat in the corner, probably couldn't dance, couldn't sing, she found a job for every single child.”

Her signature phrase: “Know that you are valued, you are cherished, and you are loved.” It's hard to get tired of hearing someone tell you that.

Her son Michael, a 32-year-old English teacher and drama director in the Livingston School District, says his mother had no plans to retire. Ever.

“I’ll drop dead there someday,” he remembers her saying, more than once.

And on May 18, in the middle of a drama workshop she was running, that’s exactly what happened.

To hear about the impact Karin Krenek made at Donovan Catholic, watch the video below.

'Dolly Day'

Weeks later, it’s still difficult for St. Joseph’s pastor to talk about.

“We’re a resurrection people … an Easter people,” said the Rev. G. Scott Shaffer. “But every classroom has a cross. And that's part of our life, too.

"You know, we don't sugarcoat life for our kids. We talk about the fact that life is tough," he said. "Life is tough.”

May 18 was “Dolly Day” at Donovan Catholic. That was partly owing to Father Scott.

In his six years as pastor, he’s taken a keen interest in Krenek's program, so much so that he frets over casting choices and gets butterflies on opening nights.

Some of that is because he’s often in the shows himself. “I was the bishop in ‘Les Miz,’ and I was also the rabbi in ‘Fiddler on the Roof.’ So I think they were typecasting me a little bit,” he said.

He had a new worry this spring when he learned that the eighth-graders at St. Joseph's Grade School were going on a class trip to see the musical “Hello, Dolly!” on Broadway.

What, he asked Krenek, do a bunch of 13-year-old kids know about matchmaking and hatmakers and Yonkers in the 1890s? It’ll go right over their heads, he said.

Krenek quickly rose to the challenge. She recruited Michael and several alumni who’d been in the show at Donovan to help her put on a workshop for the eighth-graders, hoping to place the story, themes and music in better context.

That Friday morning in the second-floor lecture hall, she and Michael got the program rolling, then divided the children up into groups to work with the alumni.

“Ah, looks like we still got it,” Michael joked, putting his arm around his mother.

“Yes we do,” she agreed.

Michael then walked across the room to talk to someone, but moments later a student rushed over to tell him that his mother had just fallen.

“I figured she’d fallen and twisted her ankle," he said.

But when he found her lying on the chapel floor, a few steps from where they’d just been talking, she was already gone.

A test of faith

It’s one thing to preach and teach that death is just a part of life  — a beginning, not an end — as they do at Donovan Catholic.

But it’s something else entirely when someone as beloved as Karin Krenek dies suddenly, from undetermined causes, in the middle of the school day.

The loss tested her students, and everyone in her far-reaching circle, in a way that final exams never could. But it also imparted an invaluable lesson, about the difference one person can make when they find their passion in life, and go all in.

Krenek had a gift for drawing people in and making them feel like they were part of her family, her students and colleagues say. She got them to smile, and sing, and dance, and support one another — and it turned out that her death had the exact same effect.

With rumors beginning to swirl that morning, a decision was made to make an announcement over the PA system about what had happened. Students and staff were also told to prepare to head over to the church, just across the parking lot, for an impromptu Mass.

“It was important because we all needed to be together, and we all needed to be together in the church,” said Edward Gere, Donovan’s principal.

Shaffer had gone with Michael Krenek and the EMTs to nearby Community Medical Center, where attempts to revive Krenek failed. The Mass was already underway when he got back, so he quickly put on his vestments and joined the parochial vicar, the Rev. Jerome Guld, on the altar. But when it came time for Shaffer to read a portion of the Eucharistic Prayer, he stopped short, overcome with emotion, when he reached the part where the souls of the dead are commended to God.

Some 1,800 people attended Krenek’s viewing at the Carmona-Bolen Funeral Home a few days later. Among those who waited in the long line to pay their respects were some of the elderly veterans who had answered her casting call for “White Christmas.”

The following day, after the funeral Mass, hundreds of people gathered in the Donovan cafeteria for the repast. The mood there was anything but morose. There was a DJ, for one thing, a former drama student of Krenek’s. At some point, he started playing songs from all the musicals she’d directed, and the place went bonkers. Current and former students got up and began singing and dancing, recreating the scenes they still knew by heart, and would probably never forget.

“It was this incredible, spontaneous outpouring of grief and joy and faith and love and happiness, all at once,” Michael Krenek said.

His uncle, Bill McKechnie, who lives in Virginia Beach, Virginia, said it had been a good seven, eight years since he'd seen one of his sister's shows. Until that moment, he didn't fully appreciate what a rock star she'd become.

"It was pretty overwhelming," he said.

If there’s any consolation, Michael Krenek says, it’s that his mother died where she did, doing what she loved — on holy ground, no less, just feet from the tabernacle in Alumni Chapel — with her students nearby but in the next room, where they were spared the added trauma of seeing her collapse.

“She was a force of nature,” her son said. “She was a hurricane, and hurricanes just stop. They don’t blow over, they just stop."

An empty desk

A month later, though, the void she left is palpable.

Among those feeling it most are Krenek's heartbroken drama students.

Erika Scales was her girl Friday. A 16-year-old rising senior, she helped design the programs and T-shirts, painted the sets, organized meetings and shadowed Krenek's every move, in addition to singing and dancing on stage.

It all started when she walked into an audition at the start of the school year and told Krenek she wanted to learn every phase of the theater.

"I started staying late and coming early. She was always at school," the Stafford teen said of her mentor.

"She got to work at 7 in the morning and stayed until 11 at night. The night before she passed away we were at school cleaning up until 10 at night after the choir concert," she recalled.

"She never complained about it. You never saw her yawn. She was doing so many things that she loved so much, it just didn't matter."

Scales says she's experienced grief before — her grandfather died earlier this year — but not like this.

"She was someone we saw every single day, who had a smile on her face 24/7 and fixed so many problems for us," she said.

"It's been really difficult to go from seeing someone for so many hours every single day to … she's not there."

Krenek's students and colleagues are reminded of her absence every time they stop by the Learning Commons, as Olabobola Alako did a couple of weeks ago just to hang out between classes.

Known as "Bobo," he's a 6-2, 270-pound lineman on the football team. A transfer student, he says Krenek was one of the first people at Donovan to introduce herself and say hi.

High school cliques can be maddeningly inelastic for someone like Krenek, who liked nothing more than to break down walls. Persuading athletes to give drama a try was one of her specialties, and she pulled out all the stops to get Bobo involved in "Dreamcoat" this spring.

Alako did not want to do it. “Everyone who knows me knows that’s not really my thing,” he explained, repeating a line Krenek had heard more times than she cared to count. But she wouldn't take no for an answer.

Blocking a blitzing linebacker, he soon learned, was a lot easier.

So there he was on stage, on opening night, dressed as one of Pharaoh's guards. It was a non-speaking, non-dancing, non-singing part, he stresses, but Krenek had made him practice dragging Mario Gallardo across the floor, over and over again, just the same. 

Being in the cast, Alako made a bunch of new friends he might never have gotten to know otherwise, he says. Many of them sing in the choir. At their urging, he sat with them for moral support at Krenek’s funeral, and if you were watching very carefully, you might have seen him singing along to some of the hymns, just a little bit.

Krenek's ID badge still rests next to her keyboard in the Learning Commons, and a lengthy to-do list she wrote in blue marker still covers one side of a whiteboard in the center of the room.

Some of the items are crossed off, others aren’t. “Dolly event’’ is the last one on the list. It’s circled, with a line through it, and has an asterisk for good measure, a sign of how much thought she'd given it. She’d told Michael she was worried it wouldn’t work out the way she wanted.

The show must go on, they say. But who could possibly fill her shoes?

Donovan's administration wrestled with that question in the days and weeks after Krenek's death.

“One of the great things about Karin was that she stepped out in faith all the time,” Father Scott said.

“You know, ‘God will provide. God will provide.’ And he does, he does. We don't know what it's going to look like yet, but God does. We have to let God lead us.”

As it turned out, they didn't have to be led very far. It will mean leaving his job in Livingston and moving in with his father for a while, but Krenek’s son Michael has accepted the job. He’ll direct the drama program next year.

“I'm not her. I’ll never be her,” he said. “But what I can be is the closest thing to her.”

Some roles, you’re just born to play.

Shannon Mullen: @MullenAPP; shannon@app.com; 732-643-4278

Donovan Catholic High School has established a scholarship in Karin Krenek's memory. More information is available at donovancatholic.org.