TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (WTWO/WAWV)— The Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology is getting ready for a big season as its performing arts series for 2025 and 2026 is underway. National shows and local productions from their students will take place during the 2025-2026 season.
The national shows have already started, but their next one will be with a major movie star as Cary Elwes will come to Hatfield Hall on October 17th for “The Princess Bride: An Inconceivable evening with Cary Elwes. Other major national shows this season include “The State Ballet Theatre of Ukraine: The Nutcracker”, “Preservation Hall Jazz Band: Creole Christmas”, “Kansas”, and more. Director of the Performing Arts at Rose-Hulman, Daniel Tryon, mentioned that students will get the chance to perform several shows and show off their talents during this season.
“It’s kind of crazy to think that of out of the twenty-one hundred students that are here at Rose-Hulman, over three hundred of them participate in our music and in the drama programs out here,” Tryon said. “The students here are really appreciated by local folks. They really see how talented they are, not only are they scientists, mathematicians and engineers, but they really are talented musicians and actors as well.”
Students aren’t just performing during the shows but also working as part of the staff to make sure the shows go smoothly.
“We end up having fifty to sixty students involved in that production between the stagehands, all the actors on stage, the live musicians in the pit,” Tryon said. “A really great amount of folks getting involved here.”
Some events during the Performing Arts Series are free, but not all of them.
“The student concerts are always free out here, but the drama club productions do have a cost with them,” Tryon said. “Since it’s a musical, it’s twenty dollars for adults and fifteen for anybody, that’s under eighteen.”
The student performances are part of the curriculum at Rose-Hulman for anyone in the performing arts, but they do get a lot of help while preparing for these shows.
“We have a full staff that’s involved with students for the musicals,” Tryon said. “Whether it’s the stagecoach, vocal coach, there’s an orchestra director, tech director that builds all the sets with them. They work together with the students to create high-quality productions. The staff here just loves working with the students, it seems sometimes seems a little bit unfair they could be so smart and so talented altogether, but again, the students here are just really great to work with.”
The first show for the student performing arts is “Rose Drama Club: Little Shop of Horrors” on Friday, October 24th, at 7:30 p.m. in Hatfield Hall. There will be two more showings of it on Saturday, October 25th, and Sunday, October 26th, both at 1:30 p.m. The next national act in the performing arts series is “The Princess Bride: An Inconceivable Evening with Cary Elwes at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, October 17th.
To learn more about the upcoming national acts in the performing arts series and how to get tickets if interested, click here. If you want to learn more about the student shows in the performing arts series and which shows you will have to get tickets for, click here.
