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Molly
Hoffman to Take Original Musical To the Additional
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Our hats are off to Upper School music instructor Molly Hoffman. Not only has the world's biggest theater festival accepted Christ Church Episcopal School as one of 36 U.S. high schools participating in its summer 2005 festival -- but Ms. Hoffman has also decided to write a new, original musical just for this venue! The musical revue, entitled Hats, will feature 18 to 24 students who, at the the time of the performances next August, will be rising ninth graders to newly minted Class of 2005 grads. Ms. Hoffman began hatching the idea for the show (which she termed a "pastiche") during her "Familiarization Trip" to Edinburgh this summer. The Fam Tour, as it is called, prepares next year's accepted high school directors for the logistics and technical requirements of participating in the festival. High schools that brought shows to the American High School Theatre Festival this summer put on a variety of productions. They ranged from the classics to contemporary, from the sublime to the ridiculous, from Sophocles' Antigone and several Shakespearean plays to such musicals as Pippin and South Pacific. According to Ms. Hoffman, a couple of schools also staged original works (with varying degrees of success). However, having seen what Ms. Hoffman can write for the musical stage with the 2002 production of her original version of Beauty and the Beast, we have no doubts that the 2005 CCES production of Hats will be a festival standout. Ms. Hoffman began to develop the concept for the show during her rainy-day visits to the free galleries and museums in Edinburgh. There she came across a private gallery owned by a patrician art broker named Alexander Meddowes, who had mounted an exhibition and sale of 124 drawings by Scottish artist John Duncan Fergusson. The subjects of many of Fergusson's sketches are depicted wearing hats. Fergusson lived between 1874 and 1961 in many of the major capitals of Europe. His loves and life were devoted to the arts, and he traveled in artistic circles with the notable Impressionist and Fauvist painters of his day, as well as with the reigning musicians and dancers of the period. (His wife was a dancer.) According to Ms. Hoffman, Hats will be a musical pastiche, drawing on the artist's sketches and anecdotal information about the figures he portrayed. But more than that, she said, "it will be a commentary on art and style itself." "During his life Fergusson was turning music into art. I think he would be amused that I am now turning his art into music," Ms. Hoffman commented. Ms. Hoffman is hard at work on Hats. So if you find her lost in thought at her piano, you might wish to tiptoe softly past. She is probably busy composing the songs our students will perform in Scotland this summer. To learn more about the artist who inspired Ms. Hoffman's new endeavor, click here and go to the exhibition catalogue. |
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