PANORAMA:

A Musical Voyage Along the Down River Ramble

Thalian Hall Special Event

In the 19th century, one of the most popular forms of entertainment was the panoramic painting: huge canvases — sometimes advertised to be three miles long (in reality, the largest were a few hundred feet) — that were slowly unscrolled before audiences, revealing distant landscapes, cities, and dramatic disasters in sequence. Thalian Hall has acquired a replica of one such panorama, depicting one of the most popular subjects of the old scrolling paintings: the Mississippi River. 

On October 16, 2026, Wilmington musician, writer, and composer Justin Lacy will accompany the panorama in song with the premiere of Alluvial River, an original musical voyage along the Mississippi, commissioned by Thalian Hall. 

This panorama was created by the University of Minnesota Theatre Arts Department for the 1988 production of Down River Ramble, a panorama show performed on the Centennial Showboat, docked in Minneapolis on the Mississippi River. Directed by Wendy Waszut-Barrett, artists C. Lance Brockman and Janet Ryger based their sprawling, more-than-100-foot-long seamless imagery on mid-1800s landscape sketches and paintings.