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The Shows Go On
MTSU Arts marks milestone while keeping students in the spotlight
Fine arts students at MTSU never really stopped sharing their craft during the pandemic and are ready to return to a full calendar of shows and bigger audiences this fall.
Celebrating its 10th anniversary of branding under one banner this year, MTSU Arts continued to put on dance concerts, musical performances, theater productions, and visual arts exhibits with an attitude and ad campaign of “The Show Must Go On.”
Livestreaming video was utilized for most events during the 2020–21 season, along with some limited in-person attendance for select shows.
“We’ve had a blast finding new ways to do theater in these very different times, and we’ve enjoyed the challenge— it has really breathed new life into the show for me,” said Kristi Shamburger, a Theatre associate professor who directed Godspell in April.
A Tony Award nominee, Godspell joins 9 to 5: The Musical, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Peter Pan, West Side Story, Les Misérables, and Kiss Me Kate as big-ticket musicals that Shamburger has directed in recent years.
Advanced multicamera TV production students from the Department of Media Arts helped audiences enjoy MTSU’s fall 2020 theater season online. The Department of Theatre and Dance handled video and streaming this spring.
Godspell cast on the musical’s crumbling cityscape set
photo by Cat Curtis Murphy
MTSU’s cast and crew set Godspell in the “now,” with performers wearing masks, socially distanced on stage, and “coming together in a time of chaos,” Shamburger said.
The COVID-19 pandemic shut down MTSU’s spring 2020 musical, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, just 18 days before its scheduled opening. A smaller-scale musical, Ride the Cyclone, and Romeo and Juliet were among offerings in fall 2020.
Senior Theatre major Caleb Mitchell of Antioch made his final Tucker Theatre appearance as Jesus in Godspell. He had starred in the last Tucker production before the pandemic, Six Degrees of Separation, which Mitchell called ironic “considering how we’re unable to be less than 6 feet apart now.
