Hundreds of teenagers — dancers, actors, singers — fill the hallways of Pearl Studios in midtown Manhattan. With nervous smiles, anxious looks and a sense their future is on the line, they are here to audition for undergraduate college theater programs.

“It’s overwhelming for them,” says Alan Rust, who has led the theater division at the Hartt School at the University of Hartford for more than 20 years.

They’ve got this huge passion to make this their life,” Rust says during a break in the three-day series of auditions. “It’s like the kid on a high school basketball team who wants to get a scholarship to one of the big schools because that leads to the NBA. Now less than 1 percent get there, but you’ve got to start somewhere, and that’s what this is.” Rust, 71, has been there himself, in another era, seeking college theater training and auditioning as an actor.

“I was raised in the Connecticut part of Ohio,” Rust jokes of his roots. Following grad school at the University of Ohio, he worked in summer stock productions of musicals with Anita Gillette, Robert Morse and Gisele MacKenzie. But in the mid-'70s he became more involved in theater education — while keeping a toe in the acting pool. (Rust has played the role of the Ghost of Christmas Present in Hartford Stage’s “A Christmas Carol” for 21 seasons and 900 performances. )

For nearly 50 years he also was associated with Monomoy Theater in Chatham, Massachusetts, first as an actor and associate artistic director and then for nearly 40 years as its artistic director. The Cape Cod theater is where students from University of Ohio and, later, the University of Hartford, immerse themselves in weekly productions every summer. The program ended two years ago when the theater was sold.

As a theater educator, Rust worked at universities in Seattle, SUNY at Purchase, Detroit, Wisconsin and the North Carolina School of Arts, where he met and became lifelong friends with Malcolm Morrison, dean of the school, and his wife, actor-teacher Johanna Morrison.

When Morrison left for a new position in Denver in 1987, Rust succeeded him as dean. But the men reconnected when Morrison was wooed in the mid-'90s to create a theater division for the Hartt School, long a music conservatory. Morrison brought Rust with him to help create a theater division, based on their work in North Carolina, and for Rust to head the acting program. When Morrison became dean of the Hartt School in 1998, Rust became head of the theater division — which soon included not only an acting program but one for musical theater.

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