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Most musicals – some would say all musicals – are adaptations. All, certainly, are highly collaborative, with directors, choreographers, and producers leading creative teams that might include separate book writers, lyricists, and composers. Certainly, tonight’s musical has plenty of parents. A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder (2014) is pretty tightly based on Kind [...]
It would be a stretch to think that juggling can be taught. The instructions would be to throw up the ball and catch the falling ball. Repeat forever. The juggler must learn for themselves how to perform that task. Mistakes will happen, balls will drop but with each mistake the juggler learns something new. [...]
Mary Anne Evans, more well known by her pen name of George Eliot, once wrote, “There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and healed, to have despaired and recovered hope.” [...]
One of my favorite aspects of Odd Squad is that the show demonstrates ways mathematical skills and reasoning can be used to solve problems. The show’s mathematical component is embedded in humorous “odd” scenarios, illuminating that math is integrated in our lives away from the Odd Squad screen. When most people think about daily uses [...]
Uniting African-American spirituals, folk songs, work songs, simple ballads, and call-and-response, the blues burst onto the musical scene in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century. The popular success of W.C. Handy’s hit Memphis Blues (1914) soon earned him the title of “Father of the Blues,” and inspired many African-American musicians [...]
Winter is my favorite season. Though undoubtedly each of the four seasons has its highlights, the frosty snow and icy north winds of winter are the most captivating to my ears. I am referring, of course, to Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, one of the most perfect examples of program music, or music that is composed [...]
In the Republic, Plato famously (or infamously) argues against the practice of imitative arts by those who will guard and rule the just city. Plato claims that those who engage in imitation lack knowledge of the things that they imitate. According to Plato, those who engage in these arts run the risk of taking on [...]
Without doubt, Stephen Sondheim is the most important artist in the history of the American Musical Theatre. He has made his career by repeatedly reinventing the traditions of the genre into something entirely new. Sondheim was essentially raised by Oscar Hammerstein (composer of South Pacific, Oklahoma, Carousel, and The King and I, to name but [...]
In 2012, Centre College’s Norton Center for the Arts sponsored a program called “We Are What We Eat”, in which authors and panelists Marian Nestle and Daphne Miller discussed the ethical, political, and nutritional implications of our food choices. For 2016, we have turned the table on the topic, with an eye toward the social, [...]
The trumpet is one of the most talked about and noticed instruments in history! From Tutankhamen to the U. S, Army Herald Trumpets of the president, we hear them announcing the arrival of dignitaries of all types. The scope of performance moves through almost every type of ceremony and yet it is capable of playing [...]
