Eyes Wide Open

Ruby Ravenswood pushes a false narrative to the editor of the college paper

For the next couple of months, these newsletters are going to be focused on the development of the Eyes Wide Open musical, or at least those elements of it that need to be ready for a June 25 launch of the Eyes Wide Open: Navigating Modern Media online course while we’re at the Braver Angels National Convention. 

The course was a side thing that I started somewhat reluctantly, because I didn’t have time for it. But I’d put the basic materials together back in 2021, when our collective confidence in being able to figure out what’s real among competing claims in our media seemed to reach an all-time low. Furthermore, I saw relationships falling apart as people chose differing narratives and started seeing each other as enemies. I realized then that my own experiences as a journalist for a conservative publication in the early 1990s, and then my leadership of a couple pro-family lobbies in the early 2000s, had taught me some things about our vulnerability to media bias that could help other people navigate the murky waters of information and misinformation in a way that helps us recover our connections with each other. 

At that time, in 2021, I was working with some friends on a plan to launch an online school. And I felt that a course on navigating media was the most important offering I could make. A course on musical theatre was going to follow. 

As it turned out, we never launched the online school. But I had this course, into which I’d poured many months of work, but it was just sitting there. So, in May of last year, when I felt a strong personal nudge to approach Braver Angels about the course, my plan was to offload it to them in its online-school format, and let them do what they wanted with it. Instead, they asked me to run it as an online seminar. So I started condensing and converting my Canvas LMS course into a series of 90 minute Zoom presentations with slide decks. 

The first seminar series happened last September through November, with about 20 regular participants in two countries, stretching across 4 time-zones. We got close with each other and requests for a repeat started pouring in. I’d incorporated my song Anger into a couple of the sessions. I had written that in response to a Braver Music Network prompt for a song about what the world needs to hear. I wanted something that expressed the message I thought we needed, without sounding preachy, and the idea of a villainous narrator (in the style of C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters) had come to me. When the song was finished, it was obvious that it belonged in a musical. But when was I going to write that?

Sometime during that series, the idea of writing another song for that still-nebulous musical for each of the 8 modules came to me. So, I restarted the seminar in late February and kept writing songs while updating the slide-decks. Again, the reception for the course has been so enthusiastic, with participants eager to share it with their friends, that this has taken on a life of its own. We are running with it as the economic engine to help get Summit Stages fully off the ground. We will also be marketing the associated musical to highschools, establishing our brand with a major target audience. 

So that’s the background. And I need to race off to the studio, where we’re getting Anger professionally produced. So, I’m cutting this newsletter short with just one more paragraph, introducing our protagonist. 

Ruby Ravenswood at Hallelujah College

Ruby Ravenswood is a villain in training. She responded to an ad in the newspaper, inviting submissions from people who wanted help getting revenge. That’s how she wound up in the Central California warehouse basement where Ira Spornova is gathering an army of malcontents that she’s turning into her henchmen and minions. Ira dangles the promise of world-domination in front of her recruits. But Ruby isn’t at all interested in that. She just wants to take down Hallelujah College and, most importantly, its principal Rev. Walker, whose unsmirched reputation is more important than the secret daughter he abandoned on her 7th birthday. Ruby gives us the lowdown on that in scene 2, with her I Want song: Burn it Down. Do not worry. There’s more to everyone than meets the eye. That’s part of the point of this musical.

Also… I’d greatly appreciate your feedback on what’s working here and what isn’t.