DeVore resignation update

Missouri drama teacher Wendy DeVore wasn't forced out of her job for choosing Midsummer Night's Dream, as I wrote earlier. The latest AP story says that DeVore resigned in order to avoid a potential firing over her fall production of the classic musical Grease which outraged some local Christian parents.

DeVore also allegedly criticized the local superintendent's handling of the Grease furor on a blog.

Superintendent Mark Enderle subsequently forced DeVore to cancel the spring production of The Crucible, a play about the Salem witch trials, for fear of offending the local Christian community. DeVore chose a contemporary adaptation of Midsummer Night's Dream as her alternate selection. Reader Lis Riba notes that the production was well-reviewed in the local paper.

So DeVore did quit after staging MND, but it wasn't that play that generated the controversy.

D'oh! That annoying gap between correlation and causation.

Comments

[mike]

An iron curtain has descended across Fulton, MO.

(Hint for haters of the obscure: Westminster College)

[gordo]

What kind of Christian gets offended by The Crucible? Surely there aren't any in the community who advocate hanging innocent people as witches.

And MND was clever. More racy in some ways than Grease, but nobody would want to publicly challenge her on it, because it's Shakespeare.

[Myrna the Minx]

Wrote an editorial of sorts on this:
http://www.renodiscontent.com/2006/03/20/teachers-under-attack-2/

[parse]

the "classic musical" Grease?

This blog is getting to highbrow for the likes of me.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

I admit, I don't know anything about musical theater. I just know that Grease gets performed all the time.

What should count as a classical American musical? Anybody? If there's interest we could make this the next Weekend Music Fight theme.

[Eli]

South Pacific, Sweeney Todd, that kind of thing. Anything but Grease.