{"id":5781,"date":"2011-03-30T12:00:06","date_gmt":"2011-03-30T17:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/?p=5781"},"modified":"2011-03-31T00:39:45","modified_gmt":"2011-03-31T05:39:45","slug":"apsus-center-of-excellence-celebrates-25th-anniversary-with-new-musical-by-two-apsu-professors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/2011\/03\/30\/apsus-center-of-excellence-celebrates-25th-anniversary-with-new-musical-by-two-apsu-professors\/","title":{"rendered":"APSU’s Center of Excellence Celebrates 25th Anniversary with New Musical by Two APSU Professors"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Clarksville, TN<\/strong> – One thing that really annoys Dr. Richard Gildrie, emeritus professor of history at Austin Peay State University, is when people commonly mistake Benjamin Franklin for a serious, pompous old man. Don\u2019t even mention to him D.H. Lawrence\u2019s essay criticizing the founding father\u2019s seminal work, \u201cThe Autobiography,\u201d unless you\u2019re looking for an argument.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat essay angered me so much, in which Lawrence took seriously the assumption in \u2018The Autobiography\u2019 where Franklin said he wanted to be perfect,\u201d Gildrie said. \u201cThe whole thing is obviously a spoof. Few people understand that Ben Franklin was quite a comedian, and the Pennsylvania Gazette was a sort of \u2018The Daily Show\u2019 of its time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Retired<\/a>

Retired Austin Peay State University professors George Mabry and Richard Gildrie joke around on the tavern set of their new musical \u201cBen and the Virtues.\u201d (Photo By Charles Booth\/APSU Public Relations and Marketing)<\/p><\/div>\n

These misconceptions finally became too much for Gildrie, and he decided to do something about it. He sat down and wrote a play in the form of a restoration comedy, using Franklin\u2019s actual words. It premiered in 2002 at the Roxy Regional Theater to modest success, but something was missing.<\/p>\n

\u201cMeredith, my wife, asked me if I thought it could work as a musical,\u201d Gildrie said. \u201cI didn\u2019t know, so I asked John McDonald (Roxy artistic director). He said, \u2018oh yeah. Go for it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

So Gildrie turned to an old friend who happened to be in the audience the night of the show\u2019s premiere \u2013 Dr. George Mabry, emeritus professor of music at APSU. The men spent about two summers in Mabry\u2019s basement, drinking coffee and making each other laugh while they fleshed out the work into an hour-and-20-minute musical. At 7:30pm on Friday, April 15th, the new show \u201cBen and the Virtues\u201d will premi\u00e8re at APSU\u2019s Music\/Mass Communication Building\u2019s Concert Hall as the climax event of the APSU Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts\u2019 25th anniversary celebration.<\/p>\n

The play is a one-act musical in the witty restoration comedy mode of Voltaire with music that pays homage to the 18th century and some of the classics of musical theater. Mabry described his compositions as \u201cMozart being mugged by Gilbert and Sullivan.\u201d The plot focuses on Franklin\u2019s early life as a printer in Philadelphia, where he and a group of friends, both real and fictional, meet in a tavern to debate and cultivate different virtues.<\/p>\n

The work has evolved drastically since its first showing in 2002. After that initial performance, Mabry wasn\u2019t sure he wanted to get involved with turning it into a musical.<\/p>\n

\u201cI said, \u2018I don\u2019t know,\u2019\u201d Mabry recalled. \u201cRichard has been a friend since 1970 when we came here to APSU. So a friend gives you something and you look at it and go, \u2018hmmm.\u2019 So I read it and read it, three or four times, to see if I could find anything in it.\u201d<\/p>\n

He decided to give it a shot, just for fun. The first thing the two men agreed on was that the music must sound as close to the 18th century as possible.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m good at aping, at stealing, I\u2019m good at plagiarism,\u201d Mabry joked. \u201cWe stole from Franklin, we stole from Mozart, we stole from Salieri. Just little bits and pieces. I finally said, \u2018yeah, I think this could work.\u2019 It got serious with me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mabry combed through the script, identifying scenes that he thought could be turned into production numbers. Then came the difficult task of using Gildrie\u2019s words, or rather Franklin\u2019s words from the 18th century, and transforming them into song lyrics.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause of the way the prose flows, the lyrics turned into things that you could write in rondo form and sonata form,\u201d Mabry said. \u201cThe overture of the piece is an original tune from the 18th century called \u2018Good Ole Colonial Days,\u2019 and I took the first four bars of that song and turned it into ABA sonata form. It was really interesting to me as a musician.\u201d
\nThe centerpiece of the show is a phony court trial, based on Franklin\u2019s embellished writing for one of his newspapers.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of his fake news stories was from Connecticut about a young woman who was habitually producing children out of wedlock,\u201d Gildrie said. \u201cShe defends herself by saying she\u2019s producing wonderful children for the king, and that God must not be unhappy because the babies are all healthy.\u201d<\/p>\n

The scene turns into a hilarious satire, pushed along by the music that calls into question the characters\u2019 abilities to overcome, scientifically, the vice of lust.<\/p>\n

Gildrie hopes the work transforms the audiences\u2019 perception of Franklin while also providing a glimpse into the mindset of the intellectuals of that age. \u201cI wanted to engage the audience in the way people in the 18th century thought about problems,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Mabry had a slightly different approach. \u201cBeing somewhat ham-ish to begin with, the most important thing for me was to entertain the hell out of the audience,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The musical runs for three days, with show times at 7:30pm on April 15th and 16th, and a matinee at 3:00pm on Sunday, April 17th. Tickets are $12.00 for adults, $10.00 for senior citizens and free to APSU students with a valid I.D.<\/p>\n

For more information on this performance, contact the APSU Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts at 931-221-7876.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clarksville, TN – One thing that really annoys Dr. Richard Gildrie, emeritus professor of history at Austin Peay State University, is when people commonly mistake Benjamin Franklin for a serious, pompous old man. Don\u2019t even mention to him D.H. Lawrence\u2019s essay criticizing the founding father\u2019s seminal work, \u201cThe Autobiography,\u201d unless you\u2019re looking for an argument. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[23,589,262,7215,4381,7213,4375,186,4012,2756,7214,4380,7216],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4xGYI-1vf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5781"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5781"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5781\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5782,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5781\/revisions\/5782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}