Angels in (Small Town) America
Friday, February 23, 2007 at 6:08 pm
- 2 Comments
MSU Theater Challenges Its Traditional Audience with Controversial Play
Greater Mankato is not known for controversial theater. It’s more known for being one of the best 100 cities in the country to rear children, for its annual softball tournaments, for its top-rated school district and for Minnesota State University, Mankato’s Division 1 hockey teams.
Yet theater fans know that MSU Mankato’s theater program is also one of the most successful college theater programs in the Midwest. Season ticket-holders number more than 2,000 for a university that serves 14,000 students in a micropolitan area of around 50,000. That means that better than one in every 25 adults in the greater Mankato area has a season ticket to MSU theater.
“Forty thousand people will see our shows each year,” says Dr. Paul Hustoles of the theater and dance department, noting that season ticket-holders come from as far as 70 miles away. Overall ticket sales generate $350,000 per year. Most programs of MSU’s size
2 Comments
Comment posted February 23, 2007 @ 9:19 pm
Angels in the Midwest Far from being unknown in the heartland, “Angels in America” has been performed in road shows and local productions in the midwest since the mid 1990s.
“Angels” appeared at the Historic State Theater in Minneapolis in 1995; “Millennium Approaches” was mounted at Wabash College in tiny Crawfordsville, Indiana, in 1996; “Angels” was an award-winning production at ISU in Bloomington IL in 1998, and was staged in Omaha, Little Rock, Milwaukee, Chicago, etc in the late 1990s.
In this century, “Angels” has been produced at such daring venues as the Weathervane Community Playhouse in Akron, Ohio, and First Banana Productions in Madison, Wisc. as well as student productions at St. Charles Community College in Missouri and Nebraska Wesleyan in Lincoln, to cite a few examples.
As far as controversial material goes, MSU tends to stage crowd pleasers, but then, so does the Guthrie.
But the MSU college stage no necessarily a stranger to gay theater–”The Boys in the Band” was mounted in 1973, while I was still in high school in a nearby town. Sure, it was produced in the smaller theater. However, given the technical demands of “Angels,” there’s no way the epic could be staged in the studio theater.
Comment posted February 23, 2007 @ 3:19 pm
Angels in the Midwest Far from being unknown in the heartland, “Angels in America” has been performed in road shows and local productions in the midwest since the mid 1990s.
“Angels” appeared at the Historic State Theater in Minneapolis in 1995; “Millennium Approaches” was mounted at Wabash College in tiny Crawfordsville, Indiana, in 1996; “Angels” was an award-winning production at ISU in Bloomington IL in 1998, and was staged in Omaha, Little Rock, Milwaukee, Chicago, etc in the late 1990s.
In this century, “Angels” has been produced at such daring venues as the Weathervane Community Playhouse in Akron, Ohio, and First Banana Productions in Madison, Wisc. as well as student productions at St. Charles Community College in Missouri and Nebraska Wesleyan in Lincoln, to cite a few examples.
As far as controversial material goes, MSU tends to stage crowd pleasers, but then, so does the Guthrie.
But the MSU college stage no necessarily a stranger to gay theater–”The Boys in the Band” was mounted in 1973, while I was still in high school in a nearby town. Sure, it was produced in the smaller theater. However, given the technical demands of “Angels,” there's no way the epic could be staged in the studio theater.
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