Embassy News
Introducing the American musical to Kazakhstan
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| Lewis Whitlock after the final performance at the National Music Academy on July 15, 2008. |
From July 8 through July 31, Lewis Whitlock, Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts at McNeese State University in Louisiana, conducted a series of master-classes on Broadway musicals in three cities in Kazakhstan – Astana, Karaganda and Pavlodar.
Since the American musical is not well known in Kazakhstan, professor Whitlock’s goal was to introduce this art form to Kazakhstani audiences. Participants in each of the cities worked with Whitlock for several hours every day throughout the course of a week and gave a short performance at the end of the workshop. In Astana, the master-class took place at the National Academy of Music; in Karaganda, professor Whitlock worked with professional actors from the Theater of Musical Comedy; and in Pavlodar, participants were students from the Music College. The workshop participants learned readily and quickly, and they performed the songs in English. One of the students remarked that he “opened up and finally started to feel that I had two arms and two legs.”
The local Karaganda newspaper “Novyi vestnik” observed that, “it was noticeable that, although there were constantly twenty people on stage, there was not a passive crowd of extras in the background. That is exactly what the local directors were learning. No one can compete with Americans' ability to unify numerous participants into one meaningful show…everything lives together as one whole organism.”
