The modern musical first became an art form in the late 19th Century. Back then, it could probably afford to be all about the entertainment. Not any more. In today's complex and trying world, we need it to be something more, to become medicine for the ills of our age.
I'm thinking in particular of two sets of ills -- the crises in mental health and in social fragmentation.
The decline in our mental wellness, especially among our young people and our marginalized communities, is complex and affected by more factors than we currently understand. What we do know is that it's getting worse, especially among English speakers, and that our healthcare systems cannot keep up with the demand. For example, according the the Center for Addiction and Mental Health, only half of Canadians dealing with major depression receive "potentially adequate care." Meanwhile, US deaths from the opioid epidemic increased by more than 600% from 1999 to 2021.
The health care system is scrambling to catch up to this calamity. We can't just wait for it to do better. We need to do whatever is in our capacity to fill in the gaps. It may be surprising to learn that we have something powerful to offer: connection. According to the CDC, feelings of connection in relationships and in the community are a key factor in preventing suicide. Meanwhile, author and addiction expert Johann Hari declares, "the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, the opposite of addiction is connection."
Can musical theatre offer the connection we need to help fight the mental health and addiction epidemic? Hold onto that thought. We'll get there in a minute.
First, let's explore another crisis: the fraying of our social fabric. This has gone from concerning to alarming since COVID 19. In a 2022 Canadian survey, the issue that respondents said was most concerning about the future was “growing political and ideological polarization.” It may be worse in the USA, where surveys since 2020 have found 50% to 61% of Americans worried that they are on the brink of civil war.
What we need is a giant infusion of hope and belonging. We need connection: shared stories, shared language, shared experience to bring us from the brink.
That’s the kind of medicine that’s created by musical theatre. First, you gather a bunch of individuals – actors, dancers, musicians and crew – to tell a shared story. Then you learn your parts - verbal, musical, and physical - and they become a common language. If you’re an actor, you practise getting into the head of the person you’re portraying, understanding how they see things and what they feel, finding ways that their experience connects with something inside yourself. You struggle and experiment and together you find ways to bring to living reality a world that connects with the heart and soul of your audience. In the end, you become more than a cast and crew. You’re a family and you belong together.
If the story that you’re bringing to the stage is a great one – if it lifts your vision and ignites your desire to reach for the best that’s within you – then you could do more than create belonging. You may come to associate the powerful, hopeful message of the show with the healing sense of connection you experienced while staging it. The songs and the lines you memorized could become a part of you, and every time they replayed in your mind, for the rest of your life, they could encourage you forward. If your mighty story is not mainstream, if it’s about life experiences that many in the cast and most of your audience haven’t understood before, you stand to gain even more in belonging. Think of what Fiddler On the Roof has taught countless actors and audiences about Jewish life. Think of what it’s done for Jewish actors, musicians, and audience members to share with others a story rich with their heritage and their resilience in the face of oppression. Does it matter that the book, music, and lyrics were all written by Jews? Absolutely – that’s what gives the story its authenticity and its layers of colour. By contrast, Pocahontas was written and directed by a group of very talented people of European descent. They tried to respectfully portray a multicultural story in a way that was appealing to their own culture. But is there any way to respectfully portray as a sweeping love story the tale of an Indigenous woman who was kidnapped from her husband, married off by her captors to an Englishman, and who died within a few short years under questionable circumstances? No matter how well-meaning the creators, an “Indigenous” story that is told from a colonialist perspective is not likely to create belonging.
But oh, the power of a multicultural story when it’s told collaboratively! I saw that first hand in 2019, after my daughter Meg and I timidly asked some Indigenous creators to collaborate with us. We’d previously written and twice staged a musical adaptation of Peter Pan, one that highlighted Wendy’s experience and her journey out of codependency. The first version had been a pairing of my songs with someone else’s script. Both were thick with demeaning Indigenous stereotypes, but nobody complained because we were all blissfully insulated from the concerns of our First Nations neighbours. A couple years later, I was asked to restage the play in a neighbouring town that sat just across the highway from the Blood Reserve – the largest Indigenous reserve in Canada. Fortunately, I’d participated in a cross-cultural initiative in the meantime and it had opened my eyes to the real damage done by racial stereotypes. This time, my daughter wrote the script and I made major changes to my songs. We thought the final product was culturally sensitive. We were wrong, but I wasn’t ready to hear that yet. The Blackfoot associate I asked for feedback was diplomatic. He gave me just a little more than I was ready at that time to accept.
Both musicals were game changers for building belonging and resilience in the homeschool groups that performed them. That was exciting to me and I dreamed of doing it one more time, only this time, in collaboration with Indigenous artists. I was a newcomer to Southern Alberta and I was troubled by the entrenched ethnic divide between Blood Tribe members and my people – the descendants of Mormon pioneers. Our communities sat right next door to each other, but we very seldom intermixed. Many of our kids went to the same schools and even played together in the younger grades. But as they grew, so did their mistrust for each other. The handful of Indigenous people in my social circle didn’t seem to have ties with anyone on reserve and it was common to hear members of the Blood Tribe referred to as a “problem” or worse. I believed that doing a musical together would begin to change that, but I had no idea how to go about it.
Then, in June 2018, Blood Tribe members set up a Peace Camp just outside of Cardston to gather information about discriminatory incidents and to call for better relations between the two communities. Someone there told me that in order to have peace between our communities, we needed meaningful engagement with each other. I told her my dream to engage meaningfully by creating a musical together. She gave me Ramona Big Head’s name and phone number.
Ramona was an educator who, in 2009, took 23 students from the Blood Reserve to a New York City festival to perform her original play about the Baker Massacre. Now, she was serving as principal of Kainai High School and she was willing to collaborate. She pulled in a team of Indigenous creators including composer Olivia Tail Feathers and playwright Carl Brave Rock and we transformed both script and music. It wasn’t an easy process; it was painful to hear about the offensive elements in a musical we thought we’d written sensitively. But true collaboration allowed us to tell a shared story, where Wendy grew, not only out of codependency but also out of cultural domination. Among its most touching moments was the scene when one of Peter Pan’s lost boys got restored to his Niitsitapi people and mother.
During rehearsals, our entire cast learned to sing Olivia's original Blackfoot music. Our actors formed lasting friendships across the divide. I watched them laughing, dancing and goofing off together at a cast party and tears came to my eyes. And the whole experience changed me and how I see the world.
That’s why I’m launching Summit Stages, because I believe that great musicals, the kind that pull you in while offering inspiration and unity, are exactly what our world needs right now. And I believe there are people scattered around the globe who see the same potential and feel the same call to use musical theatre to lift us out of despair and disconnection. There are so many beautiful, healing stories that need to be brought to the stage. There are so many gifted creators who could bring them to life, if they just had the tools and the connections to do so. Summit Stages is seeking to gather, inspire, encourage, equip and connect us so we can become mighty together. As a first step, we need to gather with each other and with people who support our vision for musical theatre, so that we can become an unstoppable force for good.
The world needs us. We need each other. Will you help to build our community? Here are some first steps:
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