Stars who went to Tenafly High School come home to raise money for their alma mater

WHO: Hope Davis, Alexie Gilmore and others.

Hope Davis, Ed Harris, Tate Donovan, Alexie Gilmore, Lea Michele and Alexander Gemignani are among the many performers who, quite remarkably, all share the same Bergen County alma mater — Tenafly High School.

And some of these success stories, including actress Davis (THS Class of '82), will return this Sunday night to the very stage where they first performed, for a fundraising event called "The Stars Come Home."

"I haven't been out there in a number of years, so I'm kind of excited to walk the halls once again," says Davis, now of Brooklyn, who adds that her old high school is "very near and dear" to her heart.

Actress Gilmore (Class of 1995), another who will "come home," was a regular in the Fox series "New Amsterdam," starred opposite Matthew McConaughey in "Surfer, Dude" and will next be seen in the movie "Labor Day," directed by Jason Reitman.

THS has also nurtured future stars from other areas of the performance world, including Baltimore Symphony concertmaster Jonathan Carney, stage designer James Youmans and actor, writer and longtime radio host Claude Knobler.

"We believe it's something in the drinking water. We think that it could be the fluoridation of the water," jokes Knobler (THS Class of 1983), who will host the event. "When they were putting this together I was really surprised how many talented people had passed through. It's sort of remarkable."

The fundraiser is designed to benefit the Collins & Tall Auditorium, whose seating very much needs to be replaced. (If additional money is raised, it would be used to launch a performing-arts endowment.) The auditorium is named after acting teacher James Collins and music teacher Susan Porter Tall, both now retired but very much involved in this show.

"We will have a wide variety of alumni coming, and some of them will be performing in scenes and some of them will be singing, and once I learn how to pronounce all of their names I will be introducing them," says Knobler, best known for his syndicated nationwide radio show, "Claude Knobler's Hollywood Reports," which ran for 15 years.

There will also be a video presentation from co-chair Ed Harris (THS, 1969), who will not be there Sunday night but who lent his name to the event for promotional purposes.

"What he did for us, especially for this performance, he made a video, speaking off the cuff to the audience and it is absolutely delightful and charming in every way," Tall said on the phone Monday, adding that Harris talks about his childhood experiences at Tenafly's Stillman School and about how he convinced his teacher to make him a co-lead in a play. He even produces and shows off a little prairie dog puppet that he made for that long-ago show.

"He has this puppet after 55 years," says Tall, adding that Harris also talks about a song he wrote for that little play. "And he proceeds to sing this song in a childhood voice. To see this guy who has done so many big roles do this, it's lovely."

Davis said she's planning to bring her children along to the show. "Now that my kids are in school and I'm trying to look at middle school and high school, I just think Tenafly High is a remarkable place, and I feel very, very lucky that I was a student there," she says.

For the "Stars Come Home" show, Davis was supposed to do a scene with her pal Tate Donovan (THS '81), but he had to bow out of the event after getting a movie role. (On Monday, Tall said that Davis had recruited her husband, Jon Patrick Walker, an actor who's off-Broadway now, "and the two of them are going to do a duet together.")

Davis — who's currently in the cast of Aaron Sorkin's HBO series "The Newsroom" and has dozens of screen credits, including "About Schmidt" and "Proof" — says she never seriously considered acting until she got to the high school, even though she and pal Mira Sorvino used to play-act together as young neighbors in Tenafly.

"I think I was 9 or 10 years when we lived across the street from one another and we did some performances in the back yard," Davis says. "We were just entertaining the neighborhood on our summer days."

Why does she think so many THS graduates have gone on to have success in the arts?

"I really think it's Jim Collins and Susan Tall. I feel they're directly responsible," she says. "They engaged me in the best way when I was a 10th-grader many, many years ago. … They were just so encouraging and so passionate about what they were doing that I fell in love with it. And I can't imagine where my life would be, where I would be, right now if I had never walked past Mr. Collins' door."

When Davis first passed his classroom, she says, Collins was new to the school and in the middle of teaching.

"I just remember thinking, 'Who is that and what is happening in that room?' I was so intrigued," says Davis, who decided she wanted to be a part of it. "I didn't have a lot of direction in my life at that point. Jim Collins seemed to see something in me, and he really encouraged me and gave me so many opportunities to kind of explore this thing that was very new to me."

Knobler, who performed in all the high school plays during his years there, also calls Collins "a remarkable teacher."