GODSPELL Opens at Three Notch Theatre

Posted by Dick.Myers_Editor On 05/03/2013

GODSPELL, with music and new lyrics by Stephen Schwartz (The Magic Show, Wicked) and book by John-Michael Tebelak, opens at the Three Notch Theatre in Lexington Park on Friday, May 3 and runs through Sunday, May 19.

GODSPELL opened off-Broadway on May 17, 1971; the first Broadway production opened in June of 1976. A Broadway revival dates from October 13, 2011. The film version was made in 1973. During the summer of 1972 “Day by Day” – a big hit for the Fifth Dimension – was #13 on the charts.

The musical is structured as a series of parables based on the Gospel of Matthew, interspersed with music that has lyrics of traditional hymns (some from the Episcopal Hymnal) incorporating a variety of musical styles such as pop, folk rock, and gospel. You might notice snippets of such tunes, updated through the years, as The Sidewalks of New York, songs from The Sound of Music, the “Miss America” theme song, the can-can theme from Offenbach’s opera Orpheus in the Underworld, There’s No Business like Show Business and even John Denver’s Country Roads. GODSPELL began as a college project by students at Carnegie Mellon University (Stephen Schwartz is a theatre alumnus) in Pittsburgh, PA, then moved to the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York’s Greenwich Village.

Michelle Ebert Freire is the director of the production at Three Notch Theatre with the Newtowne Players, and she brings a distinguished background to this project. She returns after having directed last year’s As Bees in Honey Drown. She has taught theater arts at California State University in San Bernardino and currently serves as youth arts education consultant for the Washington Performing Arts Society. She holds a BA in Theater from the University of Maryland, and an MFA in Drama and Theater for Youth from the University of Texas. GODSPELL showcases her creative and imaginative staging without giving in to sentimentality in the moving second act finale. It has been noted in many previous reviews that the Newt

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