A diary written by a 16-year-old Illinois boy who visited the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago is the source material for Sangamon Songs: A Musical Play by Tom Irwin and John W. Arden. The show will be performed at the Skokie Theatre for Performing Arts on August 19-21, 2022.
After discovering Harry Glen Ludlam’s journal in his family farmhouse, Tom Irwin began composing an acoustic song cycle about late-nineteenth-century life of a teenager in a small town in Central Illinois. Irwin’s 2012 album Sangamon Songs collects twelve of the pieces, including one titled “Hurrah for the World’s Fair.”
John W. Arden developed the album into a musical play, which debuted in August 2019 at the Salem on Seventh theater in Petersburg, IL, and was performed again at the University of Illinois Springfield Studio Theatre in November 2019 and at the Skokie Theatre in January 2020.
Tickets to Sangamon Songs: A Musical Play are available through the Skokie Theatre for Performing Arts (7924 Lincoln Ave. in Skokie, Illinois). Perfomances are August 19 at 8 pm (benefits the Skokie Community Foundation), August 20 at 7:30 pm, and August 21 at 2 pm.