Hearing my own voice on Broadway

I will not soon forget this past weekend.

Deanna, Mason and I road-tripped to NYC to see Our Town, the classic Thornton Wilder play, in a contemporary interpretation on Broadway. A song that I co-wrote and sang with my brothers from Abraham Jam, Billy Jonas and Dawud Wharnsby, is used at the opening of the play, and the production staff kindly provided me with free tickets. In the fifth row, no less!

I suspect that the production would have been incredibly moving to me even if I had no direct connection to it. It’s message of the importance of everyday experience, and its exhortation not to look down and miss our own lives, landed hard for me, and in a good way.

Our song, Braided Prayer, plays in the very first scene: One of the play’s characters walks out onto the empty stage, sits down and pensively plays just the melody of the traditional Christian hymn, Blest Be The Tie That Binds, then our song comes on over the sound system. The actor looks up in amazement, then the entire cast begins to move down through the theater, each praying quietly in their own way. Because our song is a braiding of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim prayers, they used it to quite intentionally broaden the concept of spirituality adopted in the original play. They play the entire song while the whole cast moves around the stage, then the stage manager character, played by Jim Parsons, comes out and addresses the audience. It’s hard to imagine how the song could have been more featured.

Sitting in the Ethel Barrymore Theater on Broadway and hearing my own voice ring out was an astounding experience. They used the song perfectly, and it gracefully achieves what I suspect they were trying to do, and what we were trying to do with it, as well.

The cast includes Jim Parsons (Big Bang Theory), Richard Thomas (the Waltons), Katie Holmes (Batman Begins) Zoey Deutch (Set It Up), and a whole lot of other amazing actors.

Being a child of my generation, I was most excited to see Richard Thomas, who I grew up watching after school as “John Boy” on the Waltons. He has had a long and beautiful career since then, of course, but that role was woven through my childhood, and it mattered to me in a deeper way than entertainment.

After the show, the stage manager (not the stage manager character, but the actual stage manager, Ben) invited me backstage to meet some folks, and I had a brief but rich conversation with Richard Thomas. He talked about how beautiful the song is and how perfectly it fits in the play, and kindly said that he was honored that we made the trip from North Carolina to come see the show.

It was lovely to find that Richard Thomas is just as kind, present, human, and engaged as I could have hoped. I kept thinking about what my 12-year-old self would say if I could go back in time and tell him about this conversation I would one day have, and how a song that he co-wrote would one day be in a play on Broadway. That kid is still in here, of course, and it was a beautiful experience for both of us, the little boy and the guy with gray in his beard.

Billy saw the play a few weeks ago, and loved it. Sadly, Dawud probably won’t get to see it before it closes on Jan. 19. Our voices were woven into each night that the play has run, though, and that is an amazing and humbling thing for me to think about. This song that Billy, Dawud, and I created in 2019 has found its way to a larger audience. We don’t know where songs will go. Like children, we do the best we can in forming them, then send them out there and they have adventures and connections of their own.

Lanterns are suspended above the stage, and swirl out into the space above the audience. Mason pointed out to me that the lanterns actually form a question mark. The play asks beautiful and important questions of us, and that seems just right.

I find it poetic that the royalties for this play roughly paid for the trip for my family. That seems just right. And now, forever, I will have had a song on Broadway.