Meant to educate children about how to make smart food choices, the musical will run for a little more than two weeks.
“The Birthday Feast” will open Cardinal Stage’s 2014-2015 “Cardinal for Kids” series.
The musical focuses on the story of a 10-year-old girl named Maddie and her attempts to make her mother a “birthday feast,” according to a press release.
During the show, audience members will watch the six-person cast move from a “sing-a-long at the Farmers Market” to a “big game hunt for an elusive backyard turkey,” according to the release.
Randy White, Cardinal Stage artistic director, directed and developed the show.
“When I first approached Scott Russell Sanders about writing a kid’s play about food and nutrition, I knew that he would bring the right mix of conviction, ingenuity and fun to the project,” White said in the release.
He said he knew that as a parent, he wanted to use a play as a way to introduce and reinforce some important concepts about why it matters where food comes from and why people need to think about what we put into our bodies.
“We are what we eat,” he said.
“The Birthday Feast” is musically directed by Robert Cruz, choreographed by Diane Buzzell and the set is designed by Mark Smith and Christy Wiesenhahn.
“Scott, along with composer Alex Crowley, has crafted just the clever, fun-loving, necessary musical I imagined at the outset,” White said.
This children’s musical is a part of IU College of Arts and Science’s 2014 themester theme: “Eat, Drink, Think: Food from Art to Science.”
White said in the release that this is Cardinal Stage’s sixth time partnering with Themester.
“Ten-thousand students have seen Themester shows like ‘Grapes of Wrath,’ ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and ‘Lord of the Flies,’” he said. “Cardinal Stage simply could not produce these large-scale projects without the support of Themester and Cardinal and the local school corporations are enormously grateful for the support of the College of Arts and Sciences.”
Audrey Perkins
