![]() If you know the hymn, you may also know that it was written by the English preacher John Newton. Just this week Sports Illustrated reported that Amazing Grace was played at the funeral of the NFL football player and war hero Pat Tillman. Almost everybody does, especially in America, where it is the country’s best-known hymn. “A lot of the songs within the show have crossover potential into other markets so we want to explore all of that and then make sure that we’re having the widest footprint that we possibly can, because it’s not a message for just one theatre and one town,” Smith says.I’m sure you know the hymn Amazing Grace. ![]() We hired Carolyn Copeland as our producer and then she went out and she worked the connections that we had and took those connections to the next step.”Ĭopeland and 82-year-old manufacturer Alexander Rankin raised the $16.4 million to bring the show to the Nederlander Theatre, and plans are in the works for a touring production, a cast album and possibly a film. So we were really in it together from the start. “I set up an organization with them so that if I succeeded, they succeeded. “She wasn’t completely convinced right off the bat but my investors in Bucks County never wavered,” Smith says. Producer Carolyn Rossi Copeland, who founded the Lamb’s Theatre Company in Times Square in the 1970s, came to an event in the Empire State Building and Smith began trying to convince her of the play’s potential. Smith began producing events and inviting the public. And then we went on and raised the balance of half a million dollars.” In fact we raised $350,000 in there first three months just doing that. They would come in for $5,000 here, $100,000 there. ![]() I would sell them on the idea that this is something that the market had overlooked and that it was something we really needed. “I would go to small entrepreneurs and businesses owners and people in the area and I would actually sing the songs and play the music. “I started raising money in Bucks County,” he says. He started seeking support to launch the play around his Pennsylvania hometown. Smith discovered Newton’s life story in 1997 and spent 10 years writing the musical while working as a police officer outside Philadelphia. When people get into fist fights I want to hear those punches landing.” “I want people to see real tears and hear real laughter. “Musical theatre is the most immediate entertainment in the world and I wanted people to see it,” he says. Smith sees Broadway providing a framework for that portrait. There’s not a whole lot in our culture that seems to support that message yet it’s a very deep yearning inside people and I realized that John Newton could be a great portrait of that.” “We want to know that we can go back, that we can change. “There’s something within the human heart that we want to be loved in spite of ourselves,” he says. Smith thinks audiences will connect with Newton’s story of struggle and redemption. He was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1764 and penned “Amazing Grace,” “Glorious Things of Thee are Spoken” and other classic hymns. He eventually got out of the slave trade and became a leading voice in the English abolitionist movement. Newton was rescued in 1748 and on his voyage back to England converted to Christianity. He was given to Princess Peye, an African duchess who abused him along with her other slaves. He himself became a slave when the crew of the ship he was serving on left him in West Africa. I knew that whatever else I was going to do with my life, I needed to find a way to tell this story.”īorn in London in 1725, Newton was a sailor involved in the slave trade. I had never even heard of him, and it just changed my life. “I just pulled a book out and there he was. “I just stumbled across the story of John Newton in a library,” says Smith, a former police officer turned songwriter/playwright. The play chronicles the life of John Newton, the slave trader turned abolitionist, who wrote the hymn. Josh Young, Erin Mackey and Tony Award-winner Chuck Cooper star in the musical, with music and lyrics by Christopher Smith, and book by Smith and Arthur Giron. Clementa Pinckney, who was killed in the recent Charleston church tragedy.Īmazing Grace extends beyond church walls to Broadway and opened Thursday, July 16, at the Nederlander Theater in New York. Regardless of ethnicity and religious background, the song is a cultural touchstone that often surfaces during trying times, including President Obama’s rendition during the eulogy for Rev. You don’t have to be in a pew on Sunday mornings to be familiar with the classic hymn “Amazing Grace.”
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