Wellesley’s orchestra conductor Neal Hampton told me some great news the other day. His new musical adaptation of Sense and Sensibility is going to be presented at the 2012 Colorado New Play Summit!
I had the chance to see this wonderful musical last spring, when Wellesley mounted the first staged presentation of the piece. Neal (music/lyrics) and Jeffrey Haddow (book/lyrics) have created a work that is both charming, and manages to capture the spirit of Jane Austen’s wit. I cannot imagine the challenges Austen’s prose pose to a lyricist; how to conceptualize reducing her words to stanzas? They manage to pull it off with aplomb. I still find myself humming We Must Have Sense every now and again. The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote a great article about the performance at Wellesley as an example of interdisciplinary collaboration at a liberal arts college.
He also told about the amazing new addition they have made to their creative team. Marcia Milgrom Dodge will be directing! She most recently was the director/choreography for the Broadway revival of Ragtime, which was nominated for seven Tony awards. I can’t wait to hear about what she will bring to the production.
'