The Stone Center for the Arts at Jacksonville State University is not a small room. It holds an audience. It has a fly tower. When you stand on that stage looking out at a full house in a small Alabama city, it feels like something that shouldn't exist here — and then you realize that's exactly why it does.
The Jacksonville Opera Theatre ran productions out of JSU for years under Dr. Nathan Wight and the David L. Walters Department of Music. What they built was a full operatic program in a regional university: professional-caliber productions, student casts, community audiences driving in from Calhoun County and beyond.
The shows were not small. Hansel and Gretel by Humperdinck (January 2007). The Pirates of Penzance by Gilbert and Sullivan (May 2007). The Mikado (2008). Sweeney Todd (2008). These are not easy repertoire. The Humperdinck requires two singers in the title roles who can float above an orchestra in a sustained pianissimo. Sweeney Todd requires a tenor who can act and a mezzo who will steal the show. They staged all of it.
Three production posters, all designed by Jason Wright. The Hansel and Gretel poster is covered in cast signatures — held for ten years by JSU colleague Paul Sefcik, returned in July 2026.
The posters were designed by Jason Wright, who was in the JSU Men's Chorale and art program. He made them by hand — the illustrated style, the typography, the whole visual language of the productions. Paul Sefcik, a JSU music colleague, kept all three for a decade, wrapped in a rubber band, meaning to frame them. He returned them in July 2026.
That's the kind of thing that happens when you build something worth keeping.
I was in these productions. I played the Father in Hansel and Gretel — the man who goes into the forest and comes back late, the man whose children nearly don't survive the night because he was out too long. I was in Pirates of Penzance. I played Sweeney Todd in the 2008 production — steampunk staging, Judy Shealy as Mrs. Lovett. Heather was in the audience. We were dating. We were about to get engaged. I stood on that stage in the Stone Center and sang the murder ballads of a Victorian barber and she was out there watching.
I have a B.A. in Music from JSU. Voice concentration, drama minor. The Jacksonville Opera Theatre is where I learned what it meant to carry a character through two acts in front of an audience — to commit to a thing all the way to the end.
That training has shaped everything I've done since: nineteen years of ministry communication, teaching, pastoral care, the website work, the storytelling. You learn something in a voice lesson that you cannot learn any other way: how to open the instrument, how to let the sound come from somewhere below the throat, how to trust the room. The stage teaches you to mean what you say.
Dr. Nathan Wight ran the opera program. The level he maintained was serious. He expected singers to learn the craft — technique, language (German for Humperdinck, Italian for the Mozart, English for the Gilbert and Sullivan), stage direction, character development. It was not community theater. It was university-level operatic training in a county-seat city in Alabama.
That program produced singers and directors and teachers who went on to carry those skills into churches, schools, community stages, and careers across the region. A lot of people who went through those productions still carry them.
The posters are proof something happened here. Jason made them beautiful. Paul kept them. They came home.
Matt Headley studied voice and drama at Jacksonville State University and performed in Jacksonville Opera Theatre productions from 2006 to 2008. He writes about Northeast Alabama at southernlegends.blog.
The three original production posters pictured above were designed by Jason Wright and are now in Matt's possession, returned by Paul Sefcik in July 2026.
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