Why Mighty Musicals?

For good and for ill, the news cycle this week has been compelling, starting April 1st, when the Artemis II moon mission launched into space, on its first try. On board the Orion was a team of four astronauts, three from the US and one from Canada. They brought together a wealth of differing experiences and a profound respect for what each other had to offer. 

Peacebuilding should be fun.  Warfare is serious business, whether it’s military or metaphorical; it’s characterized by anger, fear, and a cold sense of profound superiority. Peacebuilding can often be affected by those energies. But what if we treated it like play? 

It was supposed to be a Pinterest-perfect party, where we were all dressed like Seuss characters, sipping herbal tea and conversing in rhymes, with an awe-inspiring cake in the center of a well-set table in a pristine dining room.  It was not. Instead, it was something truly Seussian. And we did still speak in rhymes. In the words of Julia Cameron, “Serious art is born from serious play.”

What do you do when your nation is thrashing in the grip of a partisan divide so entrenched that it's tearing communities apart? When conversations about the issues seem loaded with landmines, and people no longer feel safe going to school or their houses of worship? For composer, director and screenwriter Ross Boothe, the answer is clear. You write a musical. You turn a crucial, timely and peacemaking concept into a full screenplay and score over the course of just 6 weeks.

A friendly and influential white supremacist goes incognito to a progressive liberal arts college where he’s outed and treated as a pariah until an orthodox Jew offers genuine friendship that will dismantle his entire worldview. 

Deaths from despair in my own community plus high-profile hate-driven killings have slammed home the necessity of making a difference and building peace in this world, however daunting the task may seem.  And in the middle of all of this, Alexander emailed me the studio video of her newest release, “Conversation on a Train.” It’s a duet by two women, both heading home from a rally/protest where they faced off against each other on one of our society’s most contentious issues:

Rumi is lead singer in a pop-superstar trio whose secret mission is to hunt and kill soul-sucking demons and eventually sing into being the Honmoon, while hiding the tell-tale patterns on her own skin that mark her as worthy of death. And the patterns are beginning to spread, just as a super-hot demon boy-ba

Guinevere Govea as Finley (center) with much of the Metro production cast. Photo by Jennifer A Lin. Today, we’re taking a peek at the...

Fourteen years in the bureaucracy-bound Chicago public school system taught Marva Collins that there had to be a better way to teach children. And peddling a Broadway musical, Marva!, has taught John Kunich a similar lesson: there has to be a better way to bring transformative stories to the stage. 

Common Ground Songwriters sing together I’m writing today from Bethel, New York, where I’m part of the Music for Peace Summit at the site...

The Woodstock music festival of August 1969 was supposed to be a money-maker for the 4 young promoters who launched it. Instead, it became a movement.  How, exactly, that happened is still a mystery to me. It ought to have been a flop. And yet, the event was groundbreaking in the lives of attendees, with ripple effects that had an outsized impact on society at large. 

This week, I’m struck by what an incredible blessing it is to live in a place and a time that offers us both the power to make a difference and enough of the necessities of life that we can even turn our attention to entertainment and building bridges across our divides. Today, I'm celebrating that, and treasuring the hope that we can indeed make a difference at a time when domestic and international friendships are being strained.

It’s impossible to separate the sounds that we call “music” from the processes of creation and their social impact. So Zork uses “musicking” to describe the whole parcel. It's a term that sums up his daily life. And his song, "The Sound of Us" encapsulates his collaborative and inclusive philosophy.

Simon of Cyrene: The Musical was to reach Black people and help them see themselves in the story of Jesus’ suffering, crucifixion and resurrection. Its writer wanted “to demonstrate to other Black boys and men how God works miracles to turn circumstances and situations into God-honoring destinies.” But just the trailer choked me up and helped me connect with the story in a way that deepens my understanding and grief about racial relations

Mind the Gap participants enact an ideological tug-of-war Collaboration across all sorts of divides is one of Summit Stages’ core...

Our shared stories unite us across generations and cultures After I praised Disney’s new version of Snow White in last week’s...

Hold an elephant-eating party! Last week, I wrote about my goal to launch a global, intentional and organized movement to build the...

When the world gathers to Salt Lake City for the 2034 Winter Olympics, the city will be flooded with living proof of musical theatre's power

Finding a solid pattern is the first step to a newbie making an impressive cake How does one create a great musical?  That’s a question...

Could a Musical Tackle Trans Issues in a Way that Lifts and Unites? Lately, I’ve seen some social media posts by friends that I’ve been...