TO BROADWAY AND BACK AGAIN - A TIMELINE OF EVENTS

In the early 1980s, composer-singer Roger Miller collaborated with playwright William Hauptman to create the original musical version of BIG RIVER. Miller and Hauptman worked on the adaptation for over a year. Prior to its Broadway opening on April 25, 1985, BIG RIVER was staged by the American Repertory Theatre in Boston, and by the La Jolla Playhouse near San Diego. BIG RIVER ran on Broadway for an astounding 1,005 performances and won seven Tony Awards®, including Outstanding Score and Best Musical.

In 2001, many years after its close on Broadway, Miller and Hauptman’s musical took on new life when Deaf West Theatre decided to stage a sign-language version of the production. As successful as that first production was, Deaf West Theatre and the show’s director, Jeff Calhoun, were eager to expand their audience and expose more people to sign-language theatre. In late 2002, Deaf West Theatre and the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles worked together to bring BIG RIVER to the Taper’s larger downtown theatre.

After successful stagings at Deaf West’s North Hollywood theatre and the Mark Taper Forum, BIG RIVER opened in New York in 2003, becoming Broadway’s first sign-language musical. All tolled, about 60,000 people saw BIG RIVER in New York. The production received glowing notices and was nominated for four Drama Desk Awards and two Tony Awards ®, including Best Revival of a Musical. The play’s remarkable journey, however, was still not over.

With funding from the Department of Education, the national tour of BIG RIVER began in San Francisco in June 2004, and continues until June, 2005, playing for 46 weeks in large venues across the country. According to producer Bill O’Brien, the national tour will satisfy Deaf West Theatre’s mission to bridge the gap between the deaf and hearing worlds by, “providing high quality cultural programming for deaf and hard-of-hearing actors who are underserved” and by, “creating a better understanding of deaf culture” for larger mainstream audiences.

Source: Discovery Journal: BIG RIVER, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

FUN FACTS
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was first published in January 1885.
• The book sold 57,000 copies in its first five months of publication.
• The book was banned from the Concord Public Library in 1885 and continues to cause controversy today.
• Mark Twain was one of the first American authors to use the everyday speech of Southern rural whites and blacks in his writing. This type of language is referred to as dialect or vernacular.
• “Mark Twain” is a nautical term used by riverboat pilots. It signifies that water is two fathoms deep, or just deep enough to be safe.