For six decades, a certain bear of very little brain has been doing something rather important on the IU South Bend campus: teaching children how to sit still, pay attention, and fall in love with live theatre. This fall, Michele's Little Hearts Theatre returns to the Hundred Acre Wood to celebrate its 60th anniversary with the same story that launched the children's theatre program in 1966.
The production, an adaptation of A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh, will be staged in the IU South Bend Campus Auditorium on Saturday, October 3, 2026, at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Admission is five dollars per person, seating is general admission, and there are no advance or online ticket sales. The box office opens one hour before each performance. Following each show, the cast will host a character meet-and-greet with activities for kids and, as the program puts it, kids at heart.
The plot is pure Milne. Winnie-the-Pooh is singing happily about how a bear likes honey when trouble arrives in the form of Kanga, who comes to the forest armed with soap for baths and spoonfuls of strengthening medicine. Something, the animals decide, must be done. It is gentle, silly, and precisely the sort of story that has been drawing schoolchildren to the campus for generations.
The public performances are only part of the picture. Michele's Little Hearts Theatre is an annual children's theatre program that provides hands-on learning opportunities for IU South Bend theatre students in all aspects of theatre production, while admission revenue supports theatre student scholarships. This year's run includes a full slate of weekday school-group performances from September 30 through October 9, with seats priced at one dollar for students, teachers, and chaperones. Each show runs about 50 minutes. Several of those school performances are already listed as full, and registration requests will not be accepted after Monday, September 14.
The program serves two audiences at once. Beyond introducing young children to the stage, it provides hands-on learning opportunities for IU South Bend theatre students in every aspect of production, and admission revenue supports theatre and dance scholarships at the university. The 2018 public performances, for example, directed all ticket money toward those scholarships. It is a rare arrangement: a children's theatre that is simultaneously a teaching laboratory and a fundraiser for the students who run it.
The history behind the name stretches back further than the anniversary count suggests. A 2018 article in the school's Aspire News, written by Neil King, traced the program's beginnings to 1963, when it was celebrating what it called its 55th year. The university now dates the program's launch to 1966, the year of the original Winnie-the-Pooh production, and is marking 60 years on that basis. The discrepancy is a reminder that institutional anniversaries are often counted from a defining moment rather than a first meeting. What is not in dispute is the scale of the tradition: by 2018, more than 80,000 students had attended the productions since just 2004, with many thousands more passing through the auditorium in the decades before that.
That longevity has made the annual show a fixture of the region's school calendar. Teachers who signed up for early notification in the spring get first crack at group registration in the fall, and the window before registration opens to everyone else is narrow. In 2018, the production was chosen for the first time by a vote of local teachers, a small sign of how much the program belongs to the community it serves rather than to the university alone.
This year's revival carries a particular symmetry. The same story that introduced South Bend schoolchildren to Michele's Little Hearts Theatre in 1966 is the one that will mark its 60th year, staged for a new generation of five-dollar ticket holders and one-dollar school groups. The bear, the honey, the soap, and the strengthening medicine have not changed. The audience has simply been renewed, year after year, for six decades.