Amazing Grace is a new original musical based on the awe-inspiring true story behind the world's most beloved song. A captivating tale of romance, rebellion and redemption, this radiant production follows one man whose incredible journey ignited a historic wave of change.
John Newton (Tony Award nominee Josh Young), a willful and musically talented young Englishman, faces a future as uncertain as the turning tide. Coming of age as Britain sits atop an international empire of slavery, he finds himself torn between following in the footsteps of his father-a slave trader-or embracing the more compassionate views of his childhood sweetheart (Erin Mackey). Accompanied by his slave, Thomas (Tony Award winner Chuck Cooper), John embarks on a perilous voyage on the high seas. When that journey finds John in his darkest hour, a transformative moment of self-reckoning inspires a blazing anthem of hope that will finally guide him home.
Under Gabriel Barre's direction, 'Amazing Grace' feels like a long adult-ed lecture or a night at 'Parsifal'...Smith ends his musical with a stirring rendition of 'Amazing Grace,' but the rest of the score utterly lacks Newton's simplicity and instead treads heavily in the current Broadway vogue for bombastic anthems coupled with a strong percussive element that's meant to send audiences to their feet applauding...In their final exchange, Mary asks Newton why 'it took you so long' to give up his slave-trader ways. Theatergoers will be asking that question much earlier.
Amazing Grace, a new musical purporting to tell the story of the 18th-century British abolitionist John Newton, is the 'first work of professional writing' by Christopher Smith, a 45-year-old former police officer from suburban Philadelphia. (He wrote the music and lyrics himself and co-wrote the book with the more experienced playwright Arthur Giron.) What he has somehow gotten produced, and offered with good intentions to Broadway audiences and critics, is the equivalent of a child's drawing: naïve, sincere, glowing with an unimpeachable if hard-to-pin-down vision of what it wants to be. (I'd guess that it wants to be a Christian family entertainment with a bold message about the power of redemption.) It is also a confusing cartoon so lacking in craft that it ruins any chance of being taken seriously. Certainly it can't be recommended as history; it's riddled with falsehoods that alone would sink it. But it also fails as musical theater, on two counts: the music and the theater.
2014 | Chicago |
World Premiere Production Chicago |
2015 | Broadway |
Original Broadway Production Broadway |
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