UTEP says musical theater program will change after this season
The UTEP Liberal Arts College says its musical theater program will change as the Dinner Theatre program "transitions" after this season. The Dean provided the following statement:
"Friends of UTEP Dinner Theatre:
Because you care about the future of UT El Paso’s musical productions, we wanted to take a moment to drop you a note to clarify the status of musical theater at UTEP.
Musical theater at UTEP is not going away. The same professional-grade musicals, produced for decades by UTEP Dinner Theatre, will continue at UTEP for seasons to come.
With a natural transition in leadership at the Dinner Theatre this semester, we believe now is the time to plan for the future of musical productions at UTEP. How can our efforts to create culturally-rich performances better advance UTEP’s educational and service missions? Over the next few months, the Dinner Theatre and the College of Liberal Arts, which oversees the Dinner Theatre, will be working to create a larger vision for musical productions at UTEP.
Questions we are examining include:
• How can we make sure UTEP’s theater arts students fully benefit from working with the professionals in the Dinner Theatre on these productions? How do we better integrate the productions into our theater curriculum?
• How can we increase affordable access to the performing arts for both our students and the El Paso community at large?
• What is the optimal internal structure at UTEP to provide sustainable support for musical theater moving forward?
After we work through these and other questions, we will announce plans for the future of musical theater at UTEP. We will keep offering musical shows that will serve the goals of educating and preparing our students for future jobs in theater as well as providing entertainment of high quality to our audiences. Although we haven’t set a hard deadline, we expect this planning will take several months to complete.
Musical theater lives at UTEP. Once we have finished our planning, we’ll drop you a note to let you know all the details of the next generation of UTEP musical theater.
Thank you for your continued support of the arts and of UTEP!"
Anadeli Bencomo, Ph.D.
Dean, UTEP College of Liberal Arts
