Voices from the past: Reviving a rarely heard musical on a college campus

Inspired by New York City Center’s Encores! programme, we came together as a music director and stage director to develop a new college programme focused on producing rarely heard musicals. As faculty members, we select a little-known musical and research basic production history to provide a launchpad for hands-on learning for students. Our process involves examining a show’s production history, exploring the story and score in their original historical milieu, and mounting a workshop production. Given the many forgotten musical theatre pieces, this act of excavation is possible for any college musical theatre programme, including those with limited resources. In this article, we share our approach and process, connecting strategies and tactics to experiential learning, and reflect on challenges encountered and opportunities discovered during our workshop production of Richard Maltby, Jr and David Shire’s The Sap of Life, a show that spent several months Off-Broadway in 1961 and then disappeared into the composer’s closet for the next 54 years. For The Sap of Life, we seized the opportunity to offer our students the experience of working and learning directly from Maltby and Shire, who visited campus as guest artists. Our excavation process provides the opportunity for students and professors alike to learn more about how a musical is developed, written, honed and ultimately produced on the stage.