The Gospel at the Zellerbach

September 11, 1985: "The Gospel at Colonus" had its first performance at the Zellerbach Theatre in Philadelphia.

By the end of the show, the audience was on its feet, joining in with the performers. After clapping and singing along in joyful celebration to the climactic number "Lift Him Up," everyone was calmed and consoled by the final elegiac song, "Now Let the Weeping Cease."

Morgan Freeman starred as The Messenger - the pastoral leader of the congregation, while the gospel group Clarence Thomas & The Five Blind Boys of Alabama jointly embodied the role of Oedipus. Also in the cast were Isabell Monk as Antigone, Carl Lumbly as Theseus, Jevetta Steele as Ismene, Kevin Davis as Polynices, and Robert Earl Jones (the father of James) as Creon. The director was Lee Breuer of the Mabou Mines theater group, and the music was by composer Bob Telson.

But the real energy in the evening was provided by 60 members of Philadelphia's Fellowship Tabernacle Church of God in Christ Choir, who filled the risers on the stage, dressed in colorful African robes and headscarves. They created a constant living and moving presence on Alison Yerxa's set, which featured an evocative backdrop painting of salvation and redemption, in between five massive white classical pillars.

Breuer's version of the ancient Greek tragedy, in which the text of the poet Sophocles was transposed to a modern day African American Pentecostal church, had originally been performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1983, and then at Arena Stage in Washington DC in 1984. This re-staging was being produced by Philadelphia's American Music Theater Festival. Significantly, it was also being recorded by PBS' "Great Performances" series, and would be broadcast nationwide in November of that same year.

In the Wilmington News Journal, reporter Penelope Bass Cope wrote: "The surprising thing about the brilliant and unconventional 'The Gospel at Colonus' is how well the mixture of popular culture and high art works, . . . and makes the austere poetry of Sophocles immediate and the final catharsis intense."

"But what makes 'The Gospel at Colonus' memorable is not just the obvious emotionalism of the music that had members of the audience standing, clapping and shouting affirmation, but its philosophical depth. By layering the Greek tragedy with the Christian experience of the church service and our knowledge of the black experience in the United States, the story of the king who knew exile, poverty and final redemption in a happy death becomes all the more moving, all the more real."

After the West Philadelphia run, the production would go to a month-long engagement at the Chatelet Theatre in Paris, France and then to the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. In 1988 the musical was re-staged in a full Broadway production, where the Institutional Radio Choir of Brooklyn, which had featured in the original 1983 BAM production, rejoined Morgan Freeman on the stage of the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre.

Mark Lord, the former Chair of Theater at Bryn Mawr College, shared this story with us:

I was there the night they filmed it. One of the Great moments in a theater in my life. Morgan Freeman and Clarence Fountain were both totally, rapturously brilliant. Telson’s music is amazing. And Lee Breuer’s adaptation and direction were…for the ages.

Not only are the contemporary Black church service and the ritual of Greek tragedy put into conversation with one another, there are also three distinct generations of gospel styles that help to articulate Lee Breuer’s interest in the ways that each generation inherits the past. I’ve never seen a production that was as rigorously thought-through and as spectacularly delightful to be in the presence of.

The full video of AMTF's 1985 The Gospel at Colonus is on YouTube, the link is HERE.