Hi, welcome to our website!
We offer individual lessons and small acting classes with usually not more than ten students each for kids, teens, and adults in order to encourage more time for individual attention, rehearsal, and performance. Classes are offered once each week in two different series on Thursday and Sunday. Our class rooms are located in Northern Virginia. Students also come from Washington DC, southern Maryland, and other more distant towns in the national capital region.
Our teacher is Cheryl Felicia Rhoads who is pictured at left below in her Mother Goose costume in the 1990s. Cheryl earned her B.A. in Theatre Arts from the University of Iowa. After college, Cheryl's further formal training included studies with Josephine Forsberg at The Players Workshop of The Second City and with co-founder and Artistic Director Jeff Perry at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. Cheryl was also a member of The Second City National Touring Company. She worked for 20 years in Hollywood as a professional actress, comedy coach, assistant voice casting agent, voice-over artist, director, and producer of comedy shows. In the 1990s thru 2006, Cheryl's comedy classes for kids and teens were rated as "Best in L.A." by the alternative news weekly New Times Los Angeles.
Cheryl is also an individual acting coach who offers private lessons for actors who need help to prepare for auditions. She also teaches beginners and advanced actors practical advice about monologues, scene study, and improvisation with an emphasis on how to practice good diction and non-verbal communication skills that can often make an audition more effective and memorable.
Since 1995, Cheryl has taught acting to about 7,000 children, teens, and adults in both California and Virginia. When Cheryl worked in Chicago, she was nominated for a local Emmy Award and then won The Joseph Jefferson Award for best actress in a revue. She also won a Drama Logue Theater Award for her performance in a revue in Los Angeles.
Cheryl was known to thousands of children in the 1990s for her starring role as Mother Goose in The Mother Goose Video Treasury.
The musical nursery rhyme shows with puppets and live actors were very popular and favorably reviewed by Parents Magazine and are still sold today in the DVD format.
Cheryl is shown holding her big story book in the cover photo at left with her helper Bertram the Gander, whose voice was created by veteran voice actor Will Ryan. Four half-hour shows were produced in 1987 by J-2 Communications on the VHS format. In 2001, the four original shows were consolidated and re-issued in two volumes on the DVD format and can sometimes be found for sale used on Amazon or eBay but copies are rare so the best bet now is special DVD sales web sites such as the links below.
CLICK HERE TO ORDER THE NEW DVD FOR VOLUME ONE.
CLICK HERE TO ORDER THE NEW DVD FOR VOLUME TWO.
Cheryl also appeared on several network TV programs including as a series regular in the NBC show Against the Grain in 1993. She was also both a regular actor and a writer for The Motown Revue Starring Smokey Robinson in 1985. After re-locating from LA to Virginia In 2007, she started her own small acting school in the city of Falls Church for students from northern Virginia. But students also come from as far away as Baltimore, Frederick, Annapolis, Richmond, Haymarket, and Leesburg. Her school features small classes, private lessons, and audition-preparation coaching for advanced students who need as much individual time and attention as possible. Cheryl designs her classes and monologues for all ages including adults without previous acting experience. Her students have been in films, won parts in school and community theater productions, and have filmed commercials and public service announcements.
Cheryl Rhoads is a proud member of the acting profession. See links below left to learn more about The Actors' Equity Association (AEA), The Screen Actors Guild which merged with The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG/AFTRA), The Writers' Guild of America (WGA), The Producers Guild of America (PGA), the Directors Guild of America (DGA) , and other fine organizations that support America's entertainment industry.
Thank you for visiting our site. You can see Cheryl's own acting demo below as a clip on You Tube or you may CLICK HERE to see her demo in a higher quality video but Quicktime 7 is needed to see it for best results.
Some of Cheryl's major film and TV credits can be found on her page on the Internet Movie Database if you CLICK HERE.
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See Testimonials From Students, Parents,
and Talent Agents Below
Many CFR students were cast with speaking roles and as extras in the movie Life Fine Tuned filmed in Virginia in summer 2010. Cheryl Rhoads was Casting Director for the movie and also has an acting role as "Aunt Maggie." See movie trailer below: