The Gospel at Colonus


The Gospel at Colonus is an African-American musical version of Sophocles's tragedy, Oedipus at Colonus. The show was created in 1983 by the experimental-theatre director Lee Breuer, one of the founders of the seminal American avant-garde theatre company Mabou Mines, and composer Bob Telson. The musical was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The show had a brief run on Broadway in 1988.

Productions

The Gospel at Colonus premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival in November to December 1983.
The following year it received a production at the Arena Stage in Washington D.C. running from Nov 23, 1984 – Dec 30, 1984
The musical ran at the American Music Theater Festival, Philadelphia, in September 1985.
A production at the Alliance Theatre, Atlanta Ga, in 1987 included Morgan Freeman and the Blind Boys of Alabama.
The Gospel at Colonus opened on Broadway at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on March 11, 1988 in previews, officially on March 14, 1988, and closed on May 15, 1988 after 61 performances and 15 previews. Directed by Lee Breuer, the cast featured Morgan Freeman, Sam Butler, Jr., Clarence Fountain and the Five Blind Boys of Alabama and the Institutional Radio Choir of Brooklyn. Breuer was nominated for the 1988 Tony Award for his book.
The musical was a finalist for the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The musical won the 1984 Obie Award as Best Musical.
The production was the centerpiece of the outdoor Freefest in 1995 at the People's Light and Theatre Co. in Malvern, Pa. 20,000 people composed a half white, half non-white audience attending for free as part of director Danny Fruchter's Iliad Project, a multi-year performance research exploration, expanding modern performance forms by including cross cultural and ancient modes. 90 singers, largely from the churches of the racially mixed industrial town of Coatesville, Pa. performed in a suburban Philadelphia theater drawing the largest, most racially and geographically diverse audience in that theater's history.
The musical was produced at the Apollo Theater, New York City, in October 2004, featuring Charles S. Dutton as the Preacher, the Blind Boys of Alabama and the Legendary Soul Stirrers.
The production at the Nate Holden Performing Arts Center, Los Angeles, by the Ebony Repertory Theatre was nominated for the 2015 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards for theatrical excellence.
In 2018 Breuer and Telson reunited most of the original 1983 BAM cast to present The Gospel at Colonus at the Delacorte Theater in New York's Central park. The New Yorker magazine wrote: "Superlatives are increasingly difficult to back up, since most of the world speaks and tweets in exclamation points by now, but I think it’s safe to say that the director Lee Breuer’s “The Gospel at Colonus” is a masterpiece. I first saw it at BAM in 1983, when it premièred, and I left the theatre with my shirtfront drenched with tears and the perspiration of relief: here was a portrait of black life—of black music, joy, and pain—that I could understand. Brilliantly recasting Sophocles’ tragedy “Oedipus at Colonus” as a Pentecostal sermon, Breuer and his incredible composer, Bob Telson, got at the heart of difference and history and how the two helped create America. A limited run of free shows at the Public’s Delacorte Theatre, Sept. 4-9, features the legendary groups the Blind Boys of Alabama and the Original Soul Stirrers."
— Hilton Als

Overview

Breuer and Telson handed the storytelling duties to a black Pentecostal preacher and the choir of his church, who in turn enacted the story of Oedipus's torment and redemption as a modern parable. They employed the unusual device of casting The Blind Boys of Alabama to collectively portray Oedipus as well as the Institutional Radio Choir in Brooklyn and Chancel Choir of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. Other casting innovations in the performance include multiple actors in single roles, such as when The Messenger is called upon to assume the role of Oedipus in tandem with the singer cast when the role calls for stage motion that would be difficult for the blind singer to negotiate alone, the multiplicity of Oedipus's daughters and one son when the children of Oedipus appear collectively, and, indeed, with different portions of the cast, singly and in groups, assuming the duties of the traditional Greek chorus.
The New York Times's Mel Gussow has expressed the view that the result was the translation of the Greek myth into a Christian parable. In his review of the BAM production, Gussow noted: "It is surprising how organically "Oedipus" can fit within the framework of a gospel musical... the evening has the shape of a church service."
While the traditions of Greek theater as religious ritual are unfamiliar to modern audiences, Gospel at Colonus reaffirms those possibilities by its use of call-and-response and ecstatic, sung re-enactment of a culturally important story.

Television and film

In 1985 PBS televised the original Brooklyn Academy of Music production, as presented by the American Music Theater Festival at the Annenberg Center in Philadelphia, as part of the Great Performances series. The performers included Morgan Freeman as The Messenger, Carl Lumbly as Theseus, Jevetta Steele as Ismene, and Robert Earl Jones as Creon. In the 1985 incarnation, The Soul Stirrers and the Institutional Radio Choir assume roles as citizens of Colonus. In 1995 WHYY/Philadelphia aired a one hour special, The Peoples Gospel at Colonus, highlighting Director Danny Fruchter's thought that Greek Theatre and the African American Church reflect ideas about community essential to both cultures. This community involvement, in fact the chorus making the story, was central to his 1995 production at the People's Light and Theatre Co. during the 3rd Annual FreeFest, in which all tickets were free and most performers were part of the same town of nearby Coatesville, PA.
The first-act song "How Shall I See You Through My Tears?" was used as the opening number of the 2003 film, Camp.

Musical numbers