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.