I’m at rehearsal for the Fall Fest play as I write this. We’re working on “Our Town,” Thornton Wilder’s American classic. Rehearsal for this play has been different than any of the other plays I’ve been in at Bethel (which is all but one since I was a freshman, and the one I wasn’t in only had one part for a white male, and it went to a senior, as I was a freshman at the time), mostly because the cast is so big. Many larger plays are impossible to produce here just because there aren’t a huge number of us that are even interested. But John McCabe-Juhnke has decided to plow through, and he somehow got enough fantastic people to audition. Read More

Fifty-two seats, five overhead TV screens, 41 choir members, one choral director, one director of church relations, one admissions counselor, and an awesome bus driver named Mike. That was the count at the beginning of this year’s Bethel College Concert Choir Spring Tour, which cut a wide swath through the Southwest during spring break.We made it home with a similar count, but we were additionally-loaded down with fresh fruit, expanded luggage, and lots of good memories. Read More

Last time I blogged, I had just returned from the ACP conference in San Diego. While that conference was very useful and a lot of fun to attend, it did compound the mania that was Production (or Hell) Week for the musical The Light in the Piazza.”Hell week” is a strong phrase, but it caught on when I was in shows in high school, but there is some truth to it. Like Hell, it seems unending sometimes; unlike Hell, you usually end up with a performance that you’re really proud of. Read More

I have one more reason to be thankful this Thanksgiving. It was announced officially the day before Thanksgiving break that Bethel was shifting its biannual musical from Children of Eden to Lucas & Guettel’s The Light in the Piazza. The news was greeted excitedly by those already committed to the musical, and we hope we can spread the excitement.There were a number of reasons for the change. Children of Eden is written by Stephen Schwartz: the composer of Wicked, Godspell and Pippin, but Children of Eden is one of his lesser known pieces. The directors of Bethel’s show had become enthused pedagogically with Children of Eden because it dealt with Genesis subject matter that the senior religion classes at Bethel were tackling. We’re a liberal arts college, so that sort of crossover is always cool to us. Read More