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This weekend, travel back in time over 127 years at the Tampa Theatre.

An interdisciplinary team of 桃瘾社区ampa faculty and students utilized its Undergraduate Research and Inquiry grant to recover one of the most popular stage musicals of the late nineteenth century, March of the Black Hussars.

The group created a documentary about the musical, titled, March of the Black Hussars: Viennese Operetta in America that not only aims to bring the operetta back to life, but look at why it was so popular in American culture.

The film is a collaboration between Charles McGraw Groh, chair of the history, geography and legal studies program, Rodney Shores, lecturer of music, Ben Sutherland '26, a musical theatre major, and Michael Skarupa '27, a history major.

Documentary filmmaker Steven Nye 鈥�22 followed the project, which was filmed at the Tampa Theatre. At least 11 students, both current and former contributed to the film.

鈥淲e were looking at some entertainment that had been brought to the Tampa Bay Hotel and the Tampa Bay Casino 鈥� and one of the forms that apparently Henry Plant and the people who brought the entertainment to town loved was operetta,鈥� Shores said.

As the project began to grow, the students involved looked at old musical scores and made historical and artistic decisions on how to act and sing in the film.

鈥淭his involves a practice that we call 鈥榟istorically informed performance,鈥� where there's actually research into what and how people would have sung 120 years ago versus how we sing today,鈥� Shores explained.

The students were tasked with learning music that is not only performed differently than popular musical conventions used today, it is also often difficult to read, because it is translated and handwritten.

Skarupa and Groh traveled to an archive in Madison, Wisconsin, where the musical鈥檚 original records from 1885 are housed.

鈥淲e kind of transcribed it, kind of interpreted it in our own way, but also, while still remaining as true as we can to the source material,鈥� Sutherland said.

The material contained descriptions of different stage movements on where the actors would land and how they would get there, which also needed interpretation, he explained.

鈥淚t would be very vague things we had to interpret, and there鈥檇 be symbols, like an X with dots, and we had to kind of figure out what that meant,鈥� Sutherland said. 鈥淲e kind of brainstormed what these certain phrases meant, and how we could interpret that to the stage.鈥�

The film will premiere at 6 p.m. this Sunday at the Tampa Theatre, followed by a live performance of a song from听The Black Hussar听and a brief conversation with the team. The event is free and open to the community.

For more information, visit听.