Musical Fables and Tales at Benjamin and Marian Schuster Performing Arts Center

Guest narrator and Miami Valley native Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart Simpson and other characters on The Simpsons, helps the DPO celebrate storytelling in all of its various musical guises.

The Overture to Candide, which includes many melodies from Leonard Bernstein's popular comic operetta, opens the afternoon. According to Joan Peyser's biography of Bernstein, this overture is one of the most frequently performed pieces of orchestral music by a 20th-century American composer.

The DPAA's composer-in-residence, Stella Sung, contributes the score for Atlas' Revenge, a short animated film produced by the Visual Language Unit of the University of Central Florida's School of Visual Arts and Design. Atlas, a goldfish living above the canals of Venice, must find a way to save his world after his owner buys a new—and possibly deadly—tank cleaner.

Selections from Maurice Ravel’s delightful Mother Goose follow. Originally written as a piano duet for a six-year-old daughter and seven-year-old son of a friend, this work continued a tradition begun when Ravel dedicated an earlier work to their parents.

Author Norton Juster’s The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics is your typical "line loves dot, line loses dot, line gets dot back" story. Composer Robert Xavier Rodriguez’s musical telling of the tale, narrated by Nancy Cartwright, tells how the dot falls for a squiggle, requiring the line to change his shape to compete and win back the fickle dot.

Gioachino Rossini's exciting William Tell Overture, best known to many as the theme music for The Lone Ranger of radio and television, concludes this performance of Musical Fables and Tales.