Outdoor historical dramas deliver artistic entertainment and provide cultural tourists a unique opportunity to experience local heritage. Through music, dance, costumes, folklore and more, the live performances offer vacationers a taste of regional flavor.
With such great group discounts being offered this summer, these destination theaters are looking especially attractive to the group travel planner. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paul Green is credited with fathering America’s outdoor drama movement.
Green’s The Lost Colony, the story of the first English settlement in America, opened in Manteo, N.C., in the summer of 1937. Originally conceived to be a one-year celebration of the birth of Virginia Dare, the first English child in the New World, the play proved so popular that it has been running ever since.
What makes these dramas so special is that they are site-specific. Most are performed on or near the actual site of the events portrayed in the play. For example, The Lost Colony’s Waterside Theatre is on the grounds of the National Park Service’s Fort Raleigh National
Historic Site, the very place of that first British colony.
Three more of Green’s symphonic dramas are performed annually in such site-specific amphitheaters. In My Old Kentucky Home State Park in Bardstown, Ky., Stephen Foster: The Musical brings alive the music of America’s first great composer. TEXAS! Musical Drama is staged in the breathtaking Palo Duro Canyon State Park near Canyon, Tex. The story highlights the early struggles between cowboys and ranchers in the Texas panhandle.
Green’s Trumpet In The Land in New Philadelphia, Ohio, dramatizes the conflicts that erupted on the Ohio frontier during the Revolutionary War.
By Rob Franklin Fox
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Courtesy of leisuregrouptravel.com
