We will soon have a completed rough draft of our musical. As we switch from writing and composing to editting, we will also get more info out to the general public, but here is a brief update. We are open to comments on what we’re doing so far.

Process
We usually write the scenes on their own without trying to tie a bunch of them together. That means we save the stringing of consistent themes and character development for the editting process. We expect that it will tie together well, and that we couldn’t have been too unknowingly inconsistent, but the next phase of the process will reveal that to us.

Characters
One of the joys of writing is watching characters emerge from blank pages, even if they are historical people. It sometimes feels like a journey to uncover what that person was really like, and sometimes it feels like I’ll have to apologize to their ghost for how I’ve changed them. Either way, it’s been fun looking at Felix Manz, his mother Anna, Conrad Grebel, George Blaurock, Ulrich Zwingli, Martin Luther and others. Those are complex men (I say men because there isn’t enough written about Anna to say much about her either way). None of them belong fully on either side of the ’sinners or saints’ spectrum, and anyone who says otherwise doesn’t know the history well enough.

Key Details
We are focussing on the life and death of Felix Manz, mostly between the years of 1523 and 1527, taking place almost entirely in Zurich, with a few other locations thrown in, to add context.

Challenges
Making this musical into a success has a number of obstacles that will first need to be overcome.
- Interest: the story and characters are already interesting to me, but making them interesting from a commercial perspective isn’t automatic
- Preaching: if I’m true to what the early Anabaptists would have said, the dialogue will sound quite preachy, which may turn off some viewers. Can I find a more artistic way of conveying the same points? Will the audience understand?
- Objectivity: often our theological and cultural position presupposes that we will admire certain figures and despise others. One might assume that a musical of this time period from an Anabaptist perspective would be highly critical of Zwingli and suspicious of Luther. While that’s generally true, the study and writing process has definitely endeared me a little more to them.

Location and Time
Depending on how quickly we get through the next phases, we may be ready for a fall performance, or it could also be a spring performance as well. The location we’ve been talking about most seriously is St. Jacobs, which would be appropriate since its thriving tourism industry revolves around its Mennonite reputation.

Name
Our working title so far is “Shadows of Grossmunster” or some variation of that, ie. “The Shadows of Grossmunster”, “In the Shadows of Grossmunster”, “Up from the Shadows”, “Up from the Shadows of Grossmunster”
Any thoughts? Do you bring up certain good or bad conotations?