Duke's Theater Laboratory: Little Women - The Musical
When is a play more than a play? When it is a production of Theater Previews at Duke.
Little Women: The Musical hit the stage at Reynolds Theater in the Bryan Center on West Campus on October 13, 2004 and played through October, and the audience was dazzled by top-notch entertainment headlined by Sutton Foster, Broadway's darling who recently won a Tony Award for her portrayal of Thoroughly Modern Millie. Foster played the headstrong Jo March, who has inspired generations of American women since Louisa May Alcott brought the Civil War-era heroine to life. Ever-popular Maureen McGovern played Marmie, Jo's beloved mother.
Co-produced by Theater Previews, the professional producing arm of the Duke Department of Theater Studies, Little Women: The Musical enchanted the audience in Reynolds even as it functioned as a laboratory for students.
While a lab might conjure scenes of beakers and chemicals and vapors rising, the Theater Studies lab is an incubator for the creation of new plays and musicals that begin on campus, but are bound for bigger venues ---- in the case of Little Women ---- straight to the Virginia Theatre on Broadway.
"We feel that presenting new work fits perfectly into the mission of a research university," says Zannie Giraud Voss, Associate Professor and Producing Director of Theater Previews. "The real value of research is to add to the greater body of knowledge. With the creative acts of the writer or actor or designer, they too are adding to the greater body of knowledge."
Theater Previews gives students opportunities to intern with the creative team, technical team, and actors themselves, who converged from all over the country in early September to write, develop, and rehearse the work in progress on the Duke campus.
Many Duke graduates have found their life's work through their internships with Theater Studies. David Richards, a 1989 Duke grad who discovered the management side of theater during an internship at Duke, came "home" to Duke as the general manager of Little Women: The Musical . "It was so exciting for me to come back with Little Women because the experiences I had at Duke had such an impact on me. I have enjooyed giving that same opportunity to students with this show.
"We assembled a phenomenal cast. It was a great chance for the community to see a world-class production, and it was a great situation for the students because they got to see the exhilaration and magic of watching a show develop. And we got to do it all without the craziness of the New York media!"
(http://www.duke.edu/web/drama/ for more information or to purchase tickets.)
###
