Theatre Under the Stars (TUTS) is a year-round, professional, non-profit musical theatre production company. It is located in Houston, Texas, performing mostly at the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts. Theatre Under The Stars’ season generally includes both self-produced shows as well as national touring productions. While best known for their main stage shows at the Hobby Center in Downtown Houston, and their annual free summer shows at the Miller Outdoor Theatre, TUTS also offers educational programming through their training branch (The Humphreys School of Musical Theatre / HSMT), education programs for children with special needs through The River, and a wide array of community outreach projects. Founded by Frank M. Young in 1968, TUTS is currently under the direction of President and CEO, John C. Breckenridge.
TUTS has offered free public performances in the Miller Outdoor Theatre in Hermann Park each year since 1968 (deriving its name from these outdoor performances), giving 48 free large-scale musicals there through July 2010. To date, TUTS has produced more than 300 musicals including many local, national and world premieres such as Kopit and Yeston’s Phantom, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, Jekyll & Hyde, and Irving Berlin’s White Christmas. TUTS has also produced international tours including Debbie Reynolds in The Unsinkable Molly Brown, Juliet Prowse in Mame, Robert Goulet in Man of La Mancha, as well as critically acclaimed local re-inventions of classics Cabaret and Les Miserables.
TUTS’ Humphrey’s School of Musical Theatre (HSMT) provides instruction and stage experience for more than 1,700 students annually. HSMT offers year round musical theatre education programs through both open-enrollment and audition-based classes. TUTS operates an apprentice conservatory training program for high school students who may not be exposed to musical theatre at their schools. Housed in the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, TUTS also annually presents the Tommy Tune Awards, honoring the best and brightest in Houston's high school musical theatre programs.
In addition to on-site educational programming at the Hobby Center, TUTS also brings musical theatre education into the community through initiatives in local hospitals, schools and community centers throughout the greater Houston area.
With a common goal - to expand arts access to children of all abilities - The River Performing and Visual Arts Center (The River) merged with Theatre Under The Stars (TUTS) in 2010, creating a unique, barrier free, arts education model for non-profit musical theatre performing arts organizations. With the merger, TUTS Education now provides extended on-site programming as well as off-site programming for children in schools, hospitals and other community-based sites.
Famous quotes containing the words theatre and/or stars:
“The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“As we looked up in silence to those distant lights, we were reminded that it was a rare imagination which first taught that the stars are worlds, and had conferred a great benefit on mankind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)