Director’s notes and commentary
The plot of …Edward Tulane is fairly simple: a china rabbit is separated from his owner, and is found in turn by: a fisherman and his wife, a hobo and his dog, and a poverty-stricken little boy and his dying sister. The premise of the story is a bit harder to articulate.
An Ideal Husband (February 22 – 24 and March 1 – 3, 2019) Oscar Wilde’s warm and witty romantic comedy is the perfect antidote to our cold winter blahs! Sir Robert Chiltern is a paragon of public and private virtue,…
At the age of 31, Charles Dickens had already lived through several reversals of fortune and circumstance: from an idyllic early childhood, to the trauma of separation from his family, to a tentative career in journalism, to the triumphant reception…
First presented at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, in 1977, the production proved so popular that it was revived for five subsequent years.
In this version, a down-on-its-luck British travelling troupe is wondering if the show really CAN go on, after discovering that their Tiny Tim has been fired and their Scrooge abandoned them in Budapest.
We are three weeks into our rehearsal process, but it has been several years since Michael first approached me with a draft of this play. afO hosted a first read-through with some of our actor friends in July of 2016.…
The 26th season of shows produced by local faith-driven theatre company, all for One productions, is soon to begin. But behind the scenes we've been hard at work all summer to ensure that our audiences will enjoy the same excellent,…
Part of our mission at all for One is to educate as well as entertain and inspire. This blog and the dramaturgy in each program are among our efforts to enlighten and educate our audience. We hope to deepen your understanding of the background and implications of the stories we present on stage.
Here are some topics which may raise questions in the minds of our audience: Why India? What is cholera? Why are gardens walled at Misselthwaite? Are English and American robins the same? These are addressed briefly in the program, but we hope you will take the time to “read more about it” on this page, and share what you learn with your children who have enjoyed The Secret Garden.
The Golden Age of British children’s literature refers to a remarkable period during which a vast number of western literature’s best-loved books were written. Consider that between 1900 and 1930:
And this list is not exhaustive at all. There was also an explosion of American children’s literature at around the same time: The Wizard of Oz, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, The Call of the Wild and Pollyanna, to name a few.
The wonderful thing about all these books, to my mind, is that they are not written “down” to children, over-simplified and dripping with moral lessons. Rather, they are strong original stories which are amusing, engaging and often thought-provoking, but which are most appropriate to the genre (fairly new at the time) of children’s literature.
The first in a series of posts on the background of all for One’s The Secret Garden, which opens April 20, 2018. For tickets, call (260) 422-4226.
Who was the woman who gave the world two of its most beloved children’s classics? She was not perhaps quite what you might have expected.