With his folk musical memoir, The Butcher's Son, the Vietnamese-born actor, storyteller and musician scored a major hit – and the funding to tour it.

Mezzo-soprano Samantha Gossard’s first big role came during second grade in a musical called Steamboatin’. “I was ‘Mississippi Meg’ and I had a big monologue and a big solo, all requiring a thick southern accent — definitely a comedic role. I remember everyone laughing so much and thinking I was ‘adorable,’  and I remember my second-grade self being perplexed by that, because in my mind, I was just doing what I was supposed to do; I was committing to the role!”

Classical Revolution KC is part of a growing trend to bring classical music out of the concert hall and back into people’s lives via serendipitous discovery. “If you just grab a random 30-year-old off the street and ask, ‘Do you go the symphony?’ they’ll say, ‘No.’ It’s just not their scene,” said Nick Bell, co-founder of Classical Revolution KC, chatting after their “Chamber Music in the Bistro” performance in the bar of Californos in Westport.

In 1623, a couple of guys got together and self-published some work by a dead friend of theirs named William Shakespeare. Four hundred years later, this piece of “vanity publishing” is considered to be the crown jewel of our Western canon. Shakespeare’s First Folio, as it is now known, is one of the most influential and treasured books in history.