What can we learn from musicals, a beloved Saturday entertainment? The course explores musicals as a lens into history, a way artists in the past 100 years have grappled with the most profound challenges facing humanity in uplifting and resonant messages. Through works such as Oklahoma, Show Boat, West Side Story, Hair, Rent, Hamilton, The Color Purple, Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables, and Into the Woods—as well as your own favorite, we examine the way serious individual and social issues are captured in catchy and poignant lyrics, and lively dance numbers. We will see clips, watch entire musicals, read scripts and lyrics, and experience the oldest form of human knowledge, when voice and instruments were developed to tell each other what we know so that we can keep going, sadder and wiser, inspired, and hopeful.

Dr. Mossberg will also workshop with the class her own latest musical, a historical correction about John Muir and his unknown wife Louie Wanda, their transformational love story, giving a behind-the-scenes look at the process of creating a musical out of recorded history and one's own imagination.

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR
Dr. Barbara Mossberg is a Professor of Practice at the UO Clark Honors College. Over the past forty years, Dr. Mossberg has published poetry and literary and interdisciplinary studies on leadership of ecology and the human spirit, creativity and identity, resilience and sustainability in the natural and social worlds, and learning. She teaches memoir for the Thoreau Society Write Connection, Pacific Grove Public Library, John Muir High School Alum, Wild Acorns, and other groups. Her most recent memoir won the Provost's Recognition Award from the University of Oregon.