Samuel Carter: Bulldog for Peace

I'm working madly on the Eyes Wide Open musical, so today, we're focussing on one of the characters, and giving you a rough demo of the Finale.

Meet Samuel Carter, 25, the newly hired history professor at Hallelujah College. 

It’s 1950, and Hallelujah is expanding to meet the demands of educating young WWII veterans. Samuel’s a veteran himself, having served as a medic because his Quaker beliefs exempted him from active combat. He enrolled at Whittier College as soon as he came home and completed both a bachelor’s and a master’s in a total of four years. His heroic record as a medic, impressive academic credentials, clean-cut appearance, and quiet charisma all make him a no-brainer choice for filling out the faculty. But that’s because nobody bothered to read his master’s thesis: The Economics of Grace: A Socioeconomic Analysis of Communalism in the Primitive Church. 

Yes, at the dawn of the cold war, Samuel chose to explore the history of communalism in early Christianity, and to contrast it with both secular communism and unbridled capitalism. His unflinching analysis laid bare the failings of both modern systems. And it’s 1950. 

Don’t misunderstand him. Nobody could properly call Samuel a rabble-rouser. It was his grandmother who bore that label when she left her family in Long Island for months at a time in order to protest as a suffragette. But neither could anybody call him subservient or submissive. No, it was his mother who bore that label after she married a non-Quaker then bore with his brutal temper for twenty years, for reasons that neither Samuel nor his older sister understood. That is, not until his father’s deathbed confession transformed Samuel’s perception of his mother from weakling to hero. 

Samuel is both implacably resolved and devoid of malice. He sees beauty in just about everyone, even the people who want to run him out of town. He believes in peace. Not as an abstract theory or an uneasy balancing of counteracting forces. He believes in peace as a dynamic, nurturing, life-giving environment that he will give the rest of his life to build.  

He also believes that he is more at home looking in Ruby Ravenswood’s eyes than he ever expected to find himself. She has a story he needs to understand, and a wound he’s aching to help heal. If he had to choose between peace and Ruby, he’d choose peace. But surely there’s no need to make such a choice?

And the proper thing to do here would be to leave you hanging. But then I wouldn't be able to share the Finale and ask for your feedback. So here's a rough version of that. Please let me know what's working for you here and what isn't. (Suno does not do a very good job of following instructions about what voice sings what part, so some of the lines sung by Samuel should actually be sung by Ruby, and vice versa).

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