BY JOSHUA HESTON AND CALEB BRUBAKER
“Do they think this is the end?” Dave Wallace wondered as he looked over an audience rising to their feet. The applause was long and lasting as the house and cast wiped away tears. Wallace was crying as well. Wallace, though only 35, had been given the role of the paternal “Shepherd” in a production created by composer Stan Beard and Dr. Hayden Head and based on Harold Bell Wright’s 1907 book The Shepherd of the Hills.
This night, the production (simply titled Shepherd the Musical) was getting a run-through of sorts — a concert reading in Gittinger Recital Hall on the campus of College of the Ozarks.