Before I became Chair in the winter of 2024, I served (and still do) as the department’s Director of Undergraduate Studies, supervising the curriculum, enrollment, and making sure that our majors and minors graduate. Since 2010, I have overseen two major curriculum overhauls, the integration of new study abroad programs, and the creation of new class offerings, including sound design, scenic painting, video production, improvisation, sketch comedy, devising theatre, script analysis and now musical theatre.
By far the greatest challenge was adapting to and surviving the pandemic, during which the demise of theatre programs in high schools and middle schools (many of them never to return) meant we would face years of students with no experience having performed in high school. Many of our majors may be students who will pursue a career outside of the arts, but their love of theatre propels them to explore and develop their artistic and technical skills during their college years. The effects of the pandemic on our department were massive, cutting the number of our majors in half and impacting our productions. Thankfully, due to the recruitment efforts of our department and the wonderful teaching that continues to draw rave reviews from our students, we have now completely recovered from the effects of the pandemic. We have more students than ever before working in both our scene and costume shops, and we have hit a new record number of minors. This season, we achieved some of our largest audience numbers, including setting attendance records for our spring musical Pippin.
As we welcome the warm summer months off the shores of Lake Erie, it is both a time to celebrate our department’s accomplishments during the 2025-26 academic year, and an opportunity to look forward to what we still aim to achieve. We will be implementing a new three-course musical theatre performance class as well as new courses in musical theatre history and costume construction. Our new senior capstone is providing more opportunities than ever for students to participate in all aspects of our mainstage productions; this year, we have students completing their senior capstone by acting and co-directing for the mainstage as well as designing and stage managing. We will soon look to offer playwriting and producing as options for seniors as well. Our new curriculum provides students with more options to satisfy their own artistic and intellectual interests, and we recently refashioned our minors as well to take advantage of all the new courses we now offer.
I’ll finish with two notes of congratulations: first, four of our faculty received word that they have been promoted! Christopher Bohan and Don Carrier received promotions to senior instructor, and Angelina Herin and I received promotions to professor. More importantly, our department is expanding, as three of our colleagues are becoming first-time parents over the summer and early fall. We offer our most heartfelt congratulations to Assistant Professor Nicholas Drashner, Theater Coordinator Gregory Przybylak and Costume Shop Manager Rainie Jiang!
My thanks for your continued support of the Department of Theater at Case Western Reserve University. We are proud to continue the traditions of success and exploration that have become the hallmark of our productions and our classes, and we invite you to keep in touch! If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me at Jeffrey.Ullom@Case.edu, and I’ll be happy to chat with you at any time!