Three Liberating New Musicals

EARLY IN THE musical Saturday Church, the endearing teenage protagonist Ulysses prays to God. His father has died, his mother is always working, and his church community keeps pushing him to be less effeminate. “I’m in here, a prisoner of all my thoughts,” Ulysses sings. “Can anybody help?”

Onto the stage—wearing a long wig, a shimmering dress, and knee-length boots—steps “Black Jesus.” “Are there any queens in the house?” they sing to the room, before proceeding to do a dance number in the style of queer Black and Latino ball culture. “I come in many forms,” they tell Ulysses. “But this is my favorite.”

Black Jesus is one of several biblically inspired characters and events to have recently debuted in new musicals in New York. And while their plots vary widely, each has mined the Bible in ways that offer fresh resources for the Christian imagination.

Saturday Church

FEATURING MUSIC BY the pop star Sia and trans DJ Honey Dijon, Saturday Church tells the story of a queer teen searching for a spiritual home. But its most provocative and joyous feature is its vision of a Black queer Jesus. As played by J. Harrison Ghee, the first nonbinary performer to win a Tony award, Black Jesus serves as Ulysses’ version of a fairy godmother, helping him embrace his sexual identity and find a supportive family.

But Black Jesus also invites Ulysses to simply enjoy life. And in doing so, Saturday Church highlights an aspect of the scriptural Jesus that we rarely consider: the delight he took in living. The gospels are filled with moments of Jesus at parties or dinners. Indeed, many of his debates with the Pharisees and others begin with him in someone’s home, enjoying a meal. His last act with his friends before his death was leading a ritual meal for them, and one of his first acts upon being resurrected was making the disciples breakfast.

Christian preaching has rarely considered the significance of these moments of celebration, perhaps out of some anxiety about associating Jesus with the physical or with pleasure. Saturday Church reveals what this omission has caused us to miss out on: not only the aspect of Jesus that delights, but also an understanding that God wants us to enjoy the bodily experience of our lives. The vocation of the Christian is not only to sacrifice but to celebrate and savor. If we begin with a joyful Jesus, the show suggests, we’ll end up not less loving, but more.

The vocation of the Christian is not only to sacrifice but to celebrate and savor. 

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Mexodus

BRIAN QUIJADA AND Nygel D. Robinson’s Mexodus is a tale of liberation, inspired by the true story of the Underground Railroad that ran not north from the Southern states but south into Mexico. Quijada and Robinson, who wrote and star in Mexodus, also created its music, utilizing a dazzling onstage recording effect called live-looping. At the beginning of the show, they note that they never learned this history in school, even though thousands of enslaved people found their freedom by fleeing south into Mexico. Quijada and Robinson imagine their performance as an act of freeing this moment in time from the prejudices that have omitted it from schoolbooks and historical memory.

Initially, the biblical Exodus seems to serve Mexodus mostly as a convenient naming device. But by its end, the musical makes a significant deviation from the biblical account. It tells the story of the relationship between a Black enslaved man, Henry, and the Mexican farmer, Carlos, who saves his life. Ultimately, each has a profound effect upon the other, and both offer transcendent moments of beauty—Henry through his songs of freedom, Carlos via stirring guitar instrumentals.

The show insists on fleshing out both characters’ stories. And in doing so it brings to the fore a significant problem at the heart of the Exodus story. In the Bible, the Canaanites are reduced to obstacles and villains whose extinction God approves of, even invites. Exodus begins as a story of liberation from slavery, but becomes a story of conquest and genocide. This painful contradiction still haunts us today.

In the end, the title “Mexodus” is not simply a clever portmanteau: It’s a form of resistance and restoration.

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Oh Happy Day!

LIKE MANY OF the stories of Genesis, the tale of Noah’s ark is usually presented as a delightful biblical fairy tale. Any child can tell you about the two-by-two parade of species onto the ark. But in truth, the story of Noah is one of the darkest moments in scripture. Humanity had so lost its way that “every desire that their heart conceived was always nothing but evil” (Genesis 6:5). God ends up killing almost every living thing on the planet, an act so horrifying that God actually promises to never do it again.

In the biblical story, Noah is understood as the one righteous person, untouched both by this evil world and the tragedy that befalls it. But in Oh Happy Day!—which is billed as a “play with music”—playwright Jordan E. Cooper reimagines Noah as a gay hustler named Keyshawn. Keyshawn, who is played by Cooper, shows up to his observant Christian father’s birthday party as a pariah, having been cast out as a teenager for his sexual orientation. A trio of gospel-singing angels have revealed to him that God is about to wipe out the world. They tell him if he’s unable to convince every member of his family to get on a boat before the flood begins, he will be damned.

Keyshawn spends much of the play struggling unsuccessfully to overcome his own righteous fury toward his father and God, all of which sounds much more befitting of Job than Noah. And yet, Cooper’s approach highlights the flaw in the Noah story: To live in a sinful world is to inevitably be harmed by it. No one escapes the sins of society untouched. To truly do well by others, we must first strip away our layers of righteous self-protection.

In our own lives, forgiveness frequently demands a long and difficult road of confrontation with the pain we’ve suffered and also that we’ve caused. But scripture rarely shows its holy figures undertaking that hard journey—or celebrates them for doing so. Cooper corrects that picture, reassuring us that our own struggle is not a flaw but an inevitability on the path to freedom.

Oh Happy Day! ends with Keyshawn tossing aside his mission and finally confronting his father with the trauma he suffered after his father kicked him out of the house. Surprisingly, God doesn’t condemn Keyshawn for deviating from the mission. Instead, God reveals that speaking the truth was the only real path to Keyshawn’s salvation and his family’s. “It was never about a boat,” God tells him. “It was about saying what couldn’t be left unsaid.”