A "Heaven-Sent" Musical about Different Approaches to Heaven

Ruth Broyde Sharone (centre) with singers and her arranger at a 2019 standing room only Meet Me There "Showcase of Songs." performed in Los Angeles

Can we be courageously inclusive without risking our ability to pass on a precious, religious or cultural identity to future generations? 

That’s the fundamental question that captured me as I read the libretto of Meet Me There: An Interfaith Musical. It was then pushed aside by an even more pressing question: what do we risk if we don’t practice courageous inclusivity? 

The musical centers on Maya, the Jewish director of an Interfaith community in Los Angles. She’s vibrant and visionary, deeply committed to dialogue and peacebuilding and the mother of an only child, Tamar, who she anticipates will carry on her legacy. But Tamar has fallen in love with Stargazer, also an only child, and his father Qaletaqa is Chief of the fictional Unequa Tribe. The two plan to marry and both prospective grandparents are deeply distressed at the prospect that their grandchildren may not carry on the faith and traditions of their people.   

Mike Stein and Shir Zahavi perform "What If My Children Go Astray"

It’s a powerful story that doesn’t shy away from the really difficult issues involved in bridge-building. In some ways, it’s reminiscent of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, the 1967 movie about a wealthy, white, liberal couple’s reaction when their daughter brings home her fiancé doctor, who is African-American. (This was released the same year that all remaining state bans on interracial marriage were overturned by the US Supreme Court). It also shares some themes with Fiddler on the Roof. But both of those stories addressed the reactions of parents within contained communities to a daughter’s decision to marry an outsider. In Meet Me There, Maya, the widowed mother, has cultivated deep belonging across religious and cultural divides. Her closest friends belong to different faiths from her own, and she doesn’t seem to carry a sense of superiority for her own faith tradition. She just holds her Judaism as inexpressibly precious. She remembers it being existentially threatened. And she wants to pass it on. 

Qaletaqa is both a foil and a likeness to Maya. His own, and his people’s experience of existential threat has turned him insular. He desperately wants to protect his son from the betrayal that he believes always follows relying on white promises. His name means “Guardian of Tradition.” And his son is to be the next chief, the one person to whom he can pass the care and protection of his people and their traditions. Obviously, in order to do that, the boy needs to marry an Unequa girl.

I’m not going to give spoilers. Instead, I’ll say that the musical offers agonizing questions instead of easy answers. And then it delivers a sense of hope about choosing love over fear. It has not yet been staged, but even the story of its creation is inspirational. 

Ruth Broyde Sharone

I learned about Meet Me There when I heard creator Ruth Broyde Sharone being interviewed on the Bit By Bit podcast of Broadway producer Megan Ann Rasmussen. Sharone is a seasoned and internationally recognized interfaith activist who, in 1993, began leading combined groups of Jews, Muslims, Christians, Hindus and others on annual peace pilgrimages. They traveled together from Cairo to Sinai to Jerusalem, sharing their faith stories along the way and finishing with a “Freedom Seder” in the Holy Land. She wrote and produced the prize-winning documentary film “God and Allah Need to Talk” and has written an award-winning memoir, Minefields and Miracles, about interfaith engagement. She was a journalist, co-founder and leader of a not-for-profit, a college professor, and an in-demand public speaker. Until 2017, she did not consider herself a songwriter. 

That’s when a change of routine found her taking daily walks on her own. The quiet became meditative, and suddenly, she heard a song: “What If, When You Awoke?”. She went home,  typed out the words, and recorded the tune that accompanied them. She called some friends to share the song. They asked how she’d written it. “I don’t have the faintest idea,” she replied. The next time she went on her walk, she got another song, until she had a collection of 30, all based “around the changing religious landscape of my life and especially in America.” 

After several months of this, she shared her collection of “heaven-sent” songs with a friend who told her she had the makings of a musical there. So she went to a “new musicals bootcamp” (New Musicals Inc) to learn how to turn the raw material of her “cosmic download” into a cohesive story. There, she was told she’d have to put all the music away and write a compelling story. She got started on that and then learned she would have to cut some of her songs and write some new ones. “That threw me into total paralysis,” she recalls, “because I thought: how can I write them?” The game was up. Her mentors were going to discover that she wasn’t actually a songwriter, just a vehicle that couldn’t create music of her own volition. And then she realized that, if the songs were being given to her, that meant that she had “access to the well of creativity, of music, of art.” So she sat down to try writing a song of her own, and when she succeeded, she realized she could do this after all.  The experience taught her to stop being afraid of creative incapacity. The well of creative material is always full, “but we impose psychological barriers and we close the pump by our fears.” 

“I didn’t have the skills to put it all together, but the raw material came from, not just my psyche, but from my life experiences… Everything that was coming through me had my imprint on it, but I also recognize it as Holy Spirit. I don’t know how else to say it.”

Vocalist Nika Avila performs "Spiritual But Not Religious" rounding out the represented faiths as an independent mystic

Where she didn’t have the skills to bring her vision into reality, she collaborated with someone who did, like Kc Daugirdas, who arranged piano accompaniments for her songs, and the team of vocalists who helped her create two concept albums, Volumes 1 and 2. There are 22 songs in all, not all of which make it into the actual musical. But they belong together. 

When I interviewed Ruth about her story, I was deeply moved. I have believed for some time that God is raising people up to pioneer the work of building the Beloved Community by way of musical theatre. At Summit Stages, we’re just gathering them, so that we can help each other do this work together. And Ruth’s story, especially her heaven-sent songs, bore clear evidence of a divine hand leading her forward. 

To be honest, though, I was also a little anxious because I have sometimes noted an unwillingness in people who’ve held their creative work as divinely inspired, to hone it, redrafting and improving their craft. So, when Ruth sent me her libretto and her concept albums, I was both eager and a little worried about how I’d respond if I didn’t see potential for greatness.

Performance of the final song “This is Who We Are” at New Works Cabaret in Dallas/Fort Worth

I didn’t need to be worried. I read the entire libretto the night she sent it. The story captured me and didn’t let go. And I came away with the strong feeling that this musical needs to be on stages everywhere for several reasons. It offers deep understanding across faith divides. It treats with compassion the struggle to forgive the unforgivable in our histories. It inspires courage to face our fears. It doesn’t offer roses without thorns, but it does suggest that gathering roses is worth the possibility of having our fingers pricked. And on top of all that, it calls for an extraordinarily diverse cast, with Jewish, Indigenous, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, New Age, and Christian characters. Of course, those roles could be filled by actors of other faiths. But what an incredible bridge-builder it would be to produce it with actors who actually represented as many of those faith groups as possible! Because of the significant Indigenous roles, I find myself longing to bring it to Cardston, Alberta, where we are actively seeking to use theatre as a bridge for building belonging between the Blood Tribe and the descendants of Mormon pioneers. 

All of this will have to wait until the play has been workshopped, which is the next step in its progress to the stage. If you’d like to help it along the way, visit the musical’s official website where you can learn more, purchase the concept albums, and connect with Ruth.  You can also stream her 4-5:30 August 16 presentation during Interfaith Awareness Week. This will include a showcase of eight songs and the link to stream will be available here.

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