WRITING. ABANDONING. (A Musical Tale)

In 1991, while still a newly-signed writer/arranger with Word Music, I took my first shot at the art and craft of musical theater. Or, to be more accurate – church musical theater. One needs to understand that “church” is a powerful modifier in that phrase, affecting not only what one writes but why one writes it, thus differing significantly from popular musical theater. I didn’t know that at the time, but I really didn’t know anything about musical theater then. Already in my mid-30s, my exposure to musical theater had been almost entirely through films: The Sound of Music, The Music Man, My Fair Lady, etc.  I didn’t see a large-scale professional musical theater performance on stage until late 1991, when I saw Phantom of the Opera in Los Angeles. 

Church Musicals: a very brief history:

In the world of “theatre” (note the snooty spelling), a musical is a very specific thing: It’s a play, typically written by no more than three people (book, lyrics, and music), which makes little sense without its songs.  The songs (and dance!) are as important to the storytelling as the drama.  Try to imagine your favorite Broadway show without the songs!  The songs complete the character’s stories. The purpose of these shows is generally to entertain, and little else. 

In the church, the term “musical” has been applied to everything from a John W. Peterson cantata to a two-hour spectacle featuring a cast of hundreds, a light show, and live camels. The script might have been written by a pro, or by the church secretary.  The music may have been commissioned, or it may have come from a dozen different sources. In the 1980s, a form evolved that I call the Musical Passion Play.  It sprang out of the music and drama productions of large evangelical churches at Easter and Christmas.

These productions followed a basic format of inserting applicable songs, often popular choral anthems or inspirational songs, into key dramatic moments of a play.  While these presentations combined music with staged drama, they weren’t true musical theater because the songs, though well-written, weren’t composed with the intent to carry a specific dramatic scene forward. Nor were they arranged for characters to perform, but usually for a choir to sing in a Sunday service. (In fact, the play would typically work fine without the music at all!)  The resulting effect was to watch a staged concert with connecting dramatic vignettes. Most of these Musical Passion Plays relied upon home-grown scripts with music scores cobbled together from the church music library. They were often performed to pre-recorded tracks, while mega-churches sometimes used a live orchestra.  The purpose of these productions was primarily two-fold: outreach to the local community and evangelism.

By the late 1980s, church music publishers had taken notice of the Musical Passion Play performances, and began releasing prepackaged “dramatic musicals,” which were still very much in keeping with the Musical Passion Play model: drama interspersed with a lot of choral music. The publisher’s aim was to sell choral books, after all, so it only made sense that the scores for these works were choir-heavy.  Often, the musicals were anchored by popular inspirational songs of the day. (These songs by artists such as Sandi Patti and Steve Green were not only radio hits, but they also translated well to choral arrangements.)  The published dramatic musicals took a significant step toward more genuine musical theater, in that many of the songs in these musicals were composed specifically for the shows.  As a result, the music had a greater dramatic impact. 

It was at about this point that I entered the world of the church dramatic musical.

First attempt:

In the late 1980s, I had been a part of several Musical Passion Plays at a large church in suburban Dallas, writing songs for characters at key moments in those productions.  I had seen first-hand how powerfully the audience responded when the lead character sang a song written for that moment.  From that observation, and probably from simply absorbing the wisdom of the movie musicals I’d seen, I determined to write an Easter musical in which every song would come from the script and push the story along.  (I didn’t learn until a few years later that this is all but a cardinal rule in composing for musical theater.)  Together with my wife, Cindy, we wrote a two-act script about a young Roman soldier in love with a Jewish girl, who is a follower of Jesus.  The soldier ultimately becomes the Centurion at the foot of the cross.  With one exception, we used place-holder titles in the script wherever we thought there should be a song.  But for the big ballad at the end, I already had written a song for a similar character, titled “I Choose Jesus.”  That was to be the anchor song.  To be honest, Cindy and I didn’t know what we were doing.  We just wrote what we thought would work.  We called the musical The Choice.  It was later pointed out that our plot was similar to the movie The Robe. Any theft on our part of the idea would have been truly subliminal, since I had seen that movie only once as a young boy, and recalled almost nothing of it.

Cindy and I pitched the script to the editorial team at Word, and we received a Good News/Bad News response. The Good News: they wanted to do the musical.  The Bad News: it had to be reduced to one act, no longer than an hour in length. The publisher was convinced the musical wouldn’t succeed if it couldn’t be performed in a typical Sunday morning worship service. (This “one-hour limit” became a recurring theme for the next several years, causing no shortage of headaches and angst for my co-writers and me.) Long story made short: We edited the script down by nearly half and began writing the songs for the show.

It seems every project I did for Word back then was done under the gun, always in a rush, with a deadline looming.  The Choice was no exception.  While I was to write all the music for the show, I recruited not only Cindy, but also Karla Worley and Claire Cloninger to help with lyrics.  Cindy ended up with music credit on one song, after I stole one her tunes to set to one of Claire’s lyrics. (What can I say? It was a lovely melody, and it fit Claire’s lyric perfectly.)  While I did all the arranging, the sales team at Word wasn’t convinced that my name alone on the cover would be enough to sell the book, so they insisted that Dave Williamson do the orchestrations.  I would have objected, except that I loved Dave and I loved his work.  He was a pleasure to partner with.

It was standard practice at the time to record all the drama dialogue as part of the demo recording. While the singing was done in Nashville, the drama was recorded in LA under the direction of Amick Byram, a talented singer and actor.  He booked a wonderful group of voice actors, several of whom I recognized from TV appearances.  It was on that trip that I saw Phantom of the Opera for the first time.  This was my introduction to Amick, with whom I continued to work several more times in the future.

The Choice also introduced me to another person, who would become a significant collaborator – Deborah Craig-Claar.  Deborah served as Word’s drama consultant, and it fell to her to write the Production Manual for The Choice.  It was during our first phone conversation that my musical theater education began.  And that education continues today.  

Soon after, The Choice recording was mixed, and the book, along with all its accompanying resources, was released.  It was well-received, and I think it’s fair to say that it set a new bar for church dramatic musicals.  Looking back, the work was good, but it was far from perfect, especially when one considers the standards of true musical theater.  How might I criticize that original show today?

• Deborah pointed out to me in our first conversation that because of the rapid and fairly drastic scene changes, the script read more like a screenplay than a stage play. She was right.  Considering that my exposure to musicals had been almost entirely on film, I suppose that’s not surprising.
• Because of the pressure to include the choir, and to avoid demanding another male soloist, I turned three significant moments into choral numbers when the character of Jesus should have carried the song.  I would continue to deal with this pressure on future musicals because the publisher, after all, was in the business of selling choral books.
• From its inception, I heard this musical in my head with a symphonic orchestral score.  But we recorded this in the early 1990s, when pop inspirational music was at its peak of popularity.  I didn’t have the courage to record the two big ballads symphonically.  Rather, we used a rhythm section in the orchestra on those two songs alone, making them sound different than every other song in the show.  I regretted that ever since.
• The most important song in the show, “I Choose Jesus” contains a lyric line that is incongruous for the character singing it. (The line refers to “Calvary,” a term no Roman soldier of that day would have ever heard.) But – because the line is arguably the most popular line in the song for a church audience, nobody notices or cares.  In fact – audiences love it.  But I know it’s a flaw. 
• There are too many characters.
• A couple of significant plot points don’t happen on stage – but are merely spoken of.  That’s always a red flag.
• The stakes for the two main characters weren’t high enough.
• The show was too short, and as a result the audience couldn’t invest deeply enough in the characters,

But… the show was done. Recorded. Printed. Out the door.  Like Leonardo DaVinci said, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” It was time to abandon The Choice and move on to other projects.  And I did… until…

But wait…there’s more

In late 2019, Deborah Craig-Claar was to have written a new Easter script for Brightmoor Christian Church, in Novi, Michigan (suburban Detroit). Now – both Deborah and I have written several projects, together and apart, for Brightmoor since 2011.  Brightmoor still does big dramatic productions at Christmas and Easter, and Deborah was in the batter’s box for Easter 2021.  That meant the script needed to be written in late 2019. Only Deborah wasn’t feeling it. She was burned out, I guess you could say. So – she threw me, her friend, under the bus.

“Have Robert re-write The Choice, and expand it into a longer show,” she said. “The story’s already there.  It’ll be a piece of cake for him.”

With friends like that, amiright??? 

Okay, I may be paraphrasing, but that’s basically how it went down.  I know because Deborah called to warn me what she had done.  So, in late 2019, I was asked to un-abandon (dis-abandon?) the very first show I ever wrote, and turn a one-act, one-hour show into a two-act, one hour & forty-five-minute production.  Because Brightmoor holds a special place in my pantheon of churches to work with, and because I am a compulsive re-writer, and because I knew that The Choice had never really been what I wanted it to be, I agreed.

And that’s how I came to spend the months of November and December, 2019, writing six drafts of a new script, which included three new songs, along with lyric tweaks and tugs on almost every other song in the show.  Here are some of the changes: I aged the lead characters, which made them more believable. They both got new songs to sing, deepening the audience’s connection to them. I dropped characters, and added new ones.  I showed things that had only been spoken of before. I flipped the entire Crucifixion scene around to focus on the characters watching it, rather than on Jesus.  (This was a huge change.) There are a lot of technical challenges in the new script – but Brightmoor is a very tech-savvy church with a sophisticated crew. I wrote for them specifically.

In February 2020, I turned in a budget to record all the new material (Brightmoor performs its shows with trax.), and awaited the go-ahead from the church. The plan was to record that summer, and they would mount the new version of The Choice at Easter 2021.  Only we all know what happened in February 2020.  The world shut down, and so did plans for the show.

I checked in with the church every year to see if they were ready to tackle it, but Covid hit them hard. By 2023, I had pretty well given up hope that the new version would ever see the light of day. Then in February 2024, four years after turning in the script and budget, I got the go-ahead.  Could we still do it for about the same money?  Yes – we could.  And we did.

I completed the new vocal arrangements with all the small lyric changes. I re-orchestrated the ballads that had rhythm section to be symphonic, and I completed the arrangements and orchestrations of the new songs.  In August, we gathered Nashville’s finest in the Historic RCA Studio A and The Choice 2025, as it had come to be called in all my files, was finally recorded and mixed.

The show is still not perfect.  (I can’t ever change that line in “I Choose Jesus.” It’s a fixture now.)  But it’s much better than the original.  The lead characters are more mature. The lyrics have been deepened.  The score is more homogenous. And Jesus now sings his own songs.  And even though I thought I had finished the script months before, Deborah (of throw-Robert-under-the-bus fame) made a late observation about the script that led me to do a scene re-write after the recording sessions. 

That said, I’ve now once again abandoned the show. But sometime early next spring, a mere 34 years after its first draft was written, I will likely be at a rehearsal at Brightmoor, and no doubt, lines will change.  And the show will be engaged once again until it is re-abandoned one final time on opening night.