Adapting Literature into Theater

Offered: Fall Semester 2012, Spring Semester 2013
Prerequisite: One year of high school level English

Page To Stage: Wicked takes students through the process of creating theatre using the Broadway musical Wicked and its cast and artistic team to illustrate ideas and methods.   Go behind the scenes to learn stagecraft and the central tenets of making theatre in this 12-week course, designed for students interested in all aspects of theatre.

Starting with a chapter from Gregory Maguire’s original book Wicked, we will explore the building blocks of good story telling that make up a Broadway show, focusing on a new discipline each week. Topics covered include; writing and analyzing text, directing, acting, casting, evaluating performances & auditions, inventing designs, staging & choreography, music & song placement, relevant themes, and ultimately — creating scenes.  Throughout the course, we will visit with various members of the Wicked company, who will add to the discussion with their experiences and, in certain cases, illustrate key points.

This course offers students the unique opportunity to spend a semester working with Broadway’s top professionals and teaching artists toward a richer understanding of the creative process.  Students will follow the adaptation of the book Wicked into the Broadway show, while creating their own scenes and breaking them down for acting & directing values, adding music (popular or their own), designing them (by creating an on line catalogue of visual ideas), casting them (from online resources), and extracting themes that make them relevant to their own lives.  Students will have the option to share their work in text, visual or video formats.  At the end of this course, students will have created and conceptualized their own scenes, highlighted relevant themes, and gained a comprehensive understanding of the collaborative process of professional theatre.

Three undergraduate credits are available for this course through the University of Nevada – Las Vegas– these credits are optional/not required for participation in the course. To learn more about undergraduate credits available, please click here.