by Daniel Hautzinger

Take a historical artist’s letters and diaries along with the impressions of their contemporaries, string them together with narration, interject related music from the period, and you get WordStage. “Its official tagline is ‘chamber music reader’s theatre,’” said Tim Tavcar over the phone. Tavcar, who is WordStage’s artistic director, sees it as “a cross-pollination of the arts, the point of which is the words and their marriage to the appropriate music.”

It’s also educational, “a catalyst to excite people’s curiosities,” which explains why WordStage is often presented by institutions like the Beachwood, Lakewood, and Cleveland Public Libraries and the Shaker Heights Art Council. The latter commissioned the upcoming Bloomsbury and the Great War, which will be performed on Jan. 24 at the Shaker Historical Society in Shaker Heights.

The Arts Council wanted a work to commemorate World War I, which began 100 years ago. [Read more…]