Dr. Frank X. “Doc” Ford was a longtime theatre teacher and director, where he spent 23 years building one of the school’s most ambitious performing-arts programs. Born in Chicago in 1940, Ford studied at Loyola University and Illinois State before earning doctorates in Drama and Cinema at USC, where he also taught. At Samohi, he directed both the Theatre Arts program and the Santa Monica Civic Light Opera, creating a professional/alumni/student partnership that allowed high-school performers to work on unusually large and demanding productions. By the mid-2000s, the program was staging as many as seven plays and musicals in a single season.

Ford’s productions ranged from serious drama to large-scale Broadway musicals, including Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Music Man, Guys and Dolls, Annie and My Fair Lady. His productions regularly used both the intimate Humanities Center Theatre and Barnum Hall, often bringing together actors, singers, musicians and technical-theatre students from across Samohi’s performing-arts programs. He died in 2022 at age 81, and a celebration of his life was held fittingly in Barnum Hall.

Frank X. Ford

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