I’m very excited to join the Old Globe Theatre as musical director and performer in a production of ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ this fall. The production will be part of their Globe For All program which launched last year and brings the works of Shakespeare to underserved communities throughout Southern California, free of charge. You can learn more about Globe For All in this article, or this video. The production will be set in Italy shortly after the end of the first World War. Much of my work in the last few years has explored American vernacular traditions of this era, so I’m eager to expand my repertoire and delve into contemporaneous European traditions. I’ve already started collecting, transcribing, and learning from old commercial and field recordings. In some ways it feels like a return to my classical music roots. Learning my first Italian mazurkas on the mandolin, I was quickly reminded of the bel-canto-inspired mazurkas and waltzes of Chopin I studied on the piano as an undergraduate at the University of Kentucky. This will be my third time working with the Globe, after 2012’s ‘Peregrine’, and ‘When It Comes’, a new work in development now and funded by the San Diego Foundation’s Creative Catalyst grant.