TEXARKANA, Texas - The muses, they say, inspire creative people to conjure art and beauty for us to enjoy.
And they'll be arriving in Texarkana soon for a cabaret-style performance in the form of The Muses, a Hot Springs, Arkansas-based troupe of singers, dancers and musicians who will present "Broken Standards: Fascinating Rhythm" on Saturday, Sept. 11.
Starting at 7 p.m. in the Regional Arts Center's Cabe Hall, the troupe will combine Baroque music with early American jazz and big band numbers, blending two origin stories, in a sense.
A choral ensemble will be joined by soloists, dancers and musicians playing everything from the piano to percussion. On tap for the night are composers Handel, Vivaldi, Back, Purcell, Porter, Gershwin and Weill over the hour-and-a-half show.
For The Muses, it's another return performance at the RAC. They've become regulars here in Texarkana.
"This is a very unique fusion. This is the first time we've done it exactly this way. Our signature standard when we come to TRAHC is we generally do opera classics, which is divided between classical opera and musical theater," said Toni Spears, troupe manager and healing arts director. "This year we're doing sort of a fusion of early opera, Baroque music, oratorio."
They'll sing famous Baroque composers, giving the origins of the opera art form, said Deleen Davidson, founder and general director. They're familiar works from 1600 to 1750, a hundred years before classical opera arrived.
"And same thing on the musical theater portion of it, we're doing the origins of American musical theater," Davidson said.
It's essentially two origin stories.
"Many many of the early songwriters in the early 1900s, they were strongly classically influenced, they were classically trained, so they have a lot of those quotes and that sort of skill in the pieces that they wrote, so it does connect over really nicely," Davidson said.
In all, they have 30 performers in the show with eight touring, professional vocalists, roughly 10 young artists who are in college and graduate school who work with The Muses regionally, plus a band that performs the music.
The audience will surely recognize a version of "An American in Paris," Davidson said.
During the night, too, they'll switch from one era to the other, going back and forth between the genres with a thematic link. Love is a theme. They move between the universal and the personal, the founder said - "the close focus to the large picture," she said.
"It's a real different sort of blend. It's a neat, neat concept," Davidson said.
They'll be dressed formally and include a multi-media projection of imagery that leads the audience through the program.
The Muses were able to persist through this past year's pandemic. They feel grateful and blessed, Davidson said. They've included some spacing and different methods to protect everyone.
"We've been blessed to remain healthy and functioning because a lot of arts organizations had to do a full-stop shut down, and we felt like it was important that we try to modify the way that we perform and the way that we work but continue, to not shut down," Davidson said. "Our theme last year was art heals, and beauty is essential."
(Tickets; $35 at the door, $25 in advance and $10 for students. To purchase tickets, call the Texarkana Regional Arts and Humanities Council at 903-792-8681.)