Top: Jacob Gannon, who kicks off the show. Bottom: Chris Pecci, who plays Jesus. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Jacob Gannon looked forward, a polished ram’s horn resting between his palms as his voice rang out over the room. “Preee-pare ye the way of the Lord!” he sang, the sound clear as a bell. In front of him, close to a dozen actors held on to every word, their eyes fixed on his forward walk. The hum of fans and sound of footfalls, audible a moment earlier, had ceased.
Somewhere in the background, a pair of larger-than-life eyes started out from a canvas, speckled in psychedelic color. As Gannon’s voice crested, the image seemed right on time.
Those worlds collide in a timely performance of Godspell, the upbeat, sometimes-saccharine and earwormy musical retelling of the parables by Stephen Schwartz and John-Michael Tebelak, and exhibition from the young artist Mia Monaco-Lizotte, a rising sophomore at North Haven High School and the ACES Educational Center for the Arts (ECA). Staged by Magnolia Theatre Company, the production gives the musical a much-needed update, setting it in the present at a time when Jesus—a Palestinian migrant, who fed and clothed the hungry, healed the sick, cared for sex workers, and died at the hands of a police state—would have likely been flipping tables.
Performances run August 13 through 16 at the Whitneyville Cultural Commons in Hamden; tickets and more information are available here. More on Monaco-Lizotte's exhibition below.
“It [the show] resonates with everybody differently,” said director Bradley Ellis, who co-founded Magnolia with Shawn Kelly in 2019, on the cusp of the Covid-19 pandemic, and kept it running through virtual rehearsals and pandemic-proofed productions that kept getting pushed back. “What I like about Godspell is it’s really the background story [of Jesus]. It’s about building a community in tumultuous times.”
Director Bradley Ellis, who co-founded Magnolia with Shawn Kelly in 2019, and then had to wait until 2022 for a proper performance.
And it is. Launched as a creative experiment when Tebelak was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University in 1970, Godspell puts the Gospel of Matthew to rock and roll, pop, a sprinkling of gospel, zingy a cappella, and folk (think Woodstock, which came just a year before the musical). Through bops like “Save The People,” here performed by an angel-voiced Chris Pecci, “Day By Day,” and “Light of the World,” the musical seeks to show Jesus’ humanity rather than his larger-than-life and miraculous presence.
It is the kind of work that could share a bill with Jesus Christ Superstar (which premiered on Broadway in 1971, the same year Godspell opened at the Cherry Lane Theater) or Hair, with a particular fondness for the counter-cultural, “Age Of Aquarius” variety of music baked into the score.
For Magnolia, which staged its first production in spring 2022 (Covid-19 upended an April 2020 launch with The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)), it’s a play that feels perfect for the moment. When Ellis chose Godspell from a running “laundry list” of shows that he always has in his back pocket, he could already envision a more current iteration coming together. Instead of the clown-like garb characters wore in the original production and later film adaptation, he wanted actors to just wear their normal clothes.
He chewed on parallels to the present: how Jesus fighting with the Pharisees didn’t feel so different from what was happening in Washington; how the disciples’ teachings would definitely be all over Instagram and TikTok (weren’t St. John the Baptist and Jesus basically the OG influencers?).
He thought about the presence of technology, surveillance and social media, and wove phones into many of the scenes. He considered Jesus’ role as a “radical” and activist, and brought in actors who could acknowledge—and move through—parallels to the state-sanctioned violence happening in their backyards, and ours too.
Cast members prepare for a full run-through of the show.
Even the venue dovetails with the production: the Whitneyville Cultural Commons is attached to a church that is under construction. Prior shows have taken place at both Joan Lynn Dance Company in Hamden, where Ellis’ daughters danced for years and where Magnolia still rehearses, and Pilgrim Congregational Church in New Haven.
“It was important for me to be clear,” he said. “We do want to hold the mirror up [to the audience] and show what we’re creating.”
As cast and crew members trickled into Joan Lynn Dance Company for a rehearsal last Friday, a storm brewing outside, their excitement for the show was palpable. Conversation rose and fell across the warm lobby, actors catching up with each other as they let the weight of the week fall away. Most had come straight from work: Pecci, who plays Jesus, was still in his veterinary scrubs when he took the stage.
As they stepped into the studio, the sound became more focused: actors ran warm ups with one another, fanned out in a big circle that made space for everyone, and peppered Ellis with last-minute questions. Pecci, who landed the role after an 11-year hiatus from musical theater, looked around and smiled. It was the end of a long week, and he seemed entirely at home.
“It’s a strange thing, looking at his humanity, because the Bible really focuses on his miracles,” he said. While Pecci grew up Catholic, it’s Godspell that has made him think more critically about the role of religion in making the world a kinder place. “Playing Jesus, I’m trying to be a better person.”
It feels like a homecoming, he added—even though the show doesn’t end particularly harmoniously for his character (does curtain call count as a resurrection?). Eleven years ago, Pecci moved to Connecticut to work on the Essex Steam Train and Riverboat, which runs a Christmastime “North Pole Express.” At the time, he was a fresh-faced musical theater grad hoping to find more work in the field. But until Godspell, the train was his only dramatic touchpoint each year. During the day, he works in a veterinary clinic in New Haven.
That enthusiasm—and love for a community, whether in the Sea of Galilee or a cultural center in Spring Glen—is contagious. Actor Gwen Kirkland Murdock, who has been with the company since its launch, said that she’s always excited to get to rehearsal, because she knows it’s part of her extended family.
“This is kind of like summer camp, where you get to come and play with your friends at the end of a hard day,” she said. “I think people need a place to meet other people and make something together.”
Back inside the studio, rehearsal hadn’t even fully started, and already a person could see how prescient the musical suddenly seemed, flower child libretto and all. Molly Davis, fresh off a performance of Seussical at the Audubon Arts summer camp, rolled in with a Memento Mori kind of t-shirt, a skull encased in pink roses that continued to bloom. On the floor, Amber Woodward stretched out, preparing for her solos in “All Good Gifts” and “On The Willows.”
In the back of the studio, resident artist Jill Butler blew gently on a pair of eyeballs attached to a black glove, transformed suddenly into a comical and slightly fearsome hand puppet. Gannon, who plays both Judas and John the Baptist, walked around the room, making the rounds before finding a spot beside Ellis to stand.
For a moment, a person could see how easily, and yet how surprisingly, his characters could shift from one to the other, corrupted by the presence of wealth and power. It seemed that he and Ellis were on the same wavelength as Ellis called the room to attention.
“Act One Judas is your friend, okay?” Ellis said, running over a few plans for the week’s upcoming performances. “Act Two Judas is your friend too. He just takes a darker turn.”
And with that, the run-through was off. Gannon-as-John lifted the ram’s horn to his lips, and a person could feel the studio transform as it sounded trumpet-like across the room, followed by the deep beams of his voice. As he walked forward, the mood shifted again, reverent and expectant and a little bit silly all at once.
On the other end of the studio, where dancers would normally be running through their warmups and routines, a handful of actors emerged from the sides of the room, ready to receive Jesus’ teachings. When Pecci stepped forward, his long hair tied into a ponytail, he raised his hands and conjured a world of possibility. The night was young, and full of song.
“Now, do not suppose that I have come to abolish the Law and the prophets!” he announced, and the play was fully in motion. “I did not come to abolish, but to complete.”
A Young Artist Steps Into The Spotlight
Just half an hour or so before rehearsal, Monaco-Lizotte stood in between a quartet of canvases, still a little shocked that her first official exhibition was less than a week away. Around her, each painting told a story: a luminous, slender blue-and-green silhouette stood in between a pair of focused eyes, the pupils and irises speckled with color. Beside it, four faces became a metaphor for the passage of time. On the table, swirls of bright color materialized into cartoon-like characters with sharp features.
A rising sophomore at the ACES Educational Center for the Arts (ECA), Monaco-Lizotte said she’s been drawing for almost as long as she can remember—probably four or five years old.
“As soon as I took a liking to painting colors on paper,” there was reliably a brush or colored pencil in her hand. For years, she honed her skill through elementary and middle school art classes, crediting teachers at North Haven’s Clintonville Elementary School for nurturing her creative spark. Then at the end of eighth grade, she got into ACES ECA. The art department, helmed by artist Johanna Bresnick, has been a game-changer.
“I think it’s the best curriculum I’ve ever been in,” she said. Currently, she is most inspired by Anime, a Japanese style of graphic design and storytelling, as well as video games like Minecraft and Zenless Zone Zero and landscapes by the painter Bob Ross.
In the dance studio, where she had temporarily propped up paintings against and on a long folding table, a viewer could see that inspiration in real time. Beside the painting of eyes—shaded mostly in black, with flecks of yellow and purple that brought them to life—four faces populated a canvas completed for her brother Jake, who heads to college this fall.
In the image, rendered in charcoal and paint, two portraits of the artist sat diagonal from each other, one slightly older, as if a clock was quietly ticking away in the background. On the left, Jake’s younger face looked out curiously onto the room, as if it was unaware of a slightly older version of him below. The image was meant to be both a gift and an exercise in portraiture, which Monaco-Lizotte has continued to work on since she arrived at ECA.
“It feels surreal that I’m having my first art show,” she said. In the last few years, she added, she’s had friends, family and classmates mention how much they like her work and ask if there’s a way to see more of it; now is their chance.
Magnolia Theatre Company presents GODSPELL August 13 through 16 at the Whitneyville Cultural Commons in Hamden; tickets and more information are available here.