Lisa Hall had a new grandchild to celebrate last year, but could only do so from afar. Her son and his family were in Colorado when the pandemic hit.
With all of the events of 2020, Hall said it hit her one morning while having coffee: “I thought, ‘Somebody is going to put script and score to this,’” she said. “This is unprecedented for our generations.”
She decided to call Ashton Wolf, a playwright from Indianapolis she’d met while filming a documentary in Nashville.
When she suggested he write a play about 2020, he said, “How about a musical?”
“Someone’s going to write about it,” she said. “Why not be the first ones?”
“2020: COVID — The Musical” will be a Brown County Playhouse exclusive, opening the second and third weekends of November.
Hall sits on the board of the Playhouse and is working with Playhouse Executive Director Hannah Estabrook to establish funds for the show.
They will be working with Indiana University’s musical theater department to perform it, as Hall said the show requires that level of experience.
From May through August last year, Hall and Wolf talked about what this production might look like. It was a news-filled year, so the pair decided to remain politically neutral and focus on the pandemic part of 2020 only.
Producing a show that focuses on the pandemic and its hardships will hopefully help the audience process what they’ve gone through, Hall said.
“People were losing loved ones, not able to have funerals or weddings,” she said. “No matter how you feel about COVID, it’s been hard.”
Hall also has been producing a local documentary called “The Addict’s Wake.” She said that an investor in that project asked what she was working on, then donated funds for the musical.
By August, Hall and Wolf had a “rough sketch” of the show and did a preview to a small group.
According to a press release from the Brown County Playhouse, a narrator takes six characters of diverse background on an “emotional musical journey” as they recount their experience, having lived in the new “normal” world of COVID-19 and the fallout from the global pandemic.
The press release said that Wolf “covers the gamut with a variety of musical styles,” all while telling the tale of “one of the most unbelievable years in human history” — “stories of human agony, confusion, pain and anger,” the release said, “but also stories about the powerful and resilient side of the human spirit with songs like, ‘My Angel — My Kitty and Me,’ ‘Into the Light,’ ‘Quarantine Tango’ and ‘In My Daddy’s Eyes.’”
“(The play) ends with a message of hope, about hope rising,” Hall said.
Wolf wrote 21 songs, his “Broadway quality” exemplified on subjects like toilet paper shortages and losing loved ones to the virus, the press release said.
This is Wolf’s 12th musical and will be his 10th to be produced on the stage.
The musical has already been registered with the Library of Congress for licensing. They will send it out to other theaters so they may do their own versions, but Hall said that it won’t be in any other Indiana theaters for now.
“We always want to be creating reasons for returning to Nashville,” Hall said. “I think for no other reason than to see what we did with it, people will come.”
