Bringing Back Joan

In the theatre, when we re-stage a production, we call it a “revival”. But, more often than not, plays and musicals are “revived” precisely because they are still alive within our collective consciousness. They never really died to begin with.

What does it mean to breathe new life into theatre we once thought dead?

Margaret Wright (Madame Margaret, the Therapist) and Lee Guilliatt (Joan)

Sandy Padilla (Sandy) and Phyllis MacBryde (Phyllis)

It started when…

In late December 2021, I had arrived over an hour early to see the revival of Caroline, or Change, and the doors to the theatre hadn’t yet opened. No matter, I decided to kill some time browsing through a used records shop next door. After only a minute of shuffling through old records, I recognized the artwork on one of the albums: Joan. With book, music, and lyrics by Al Carmines. I recognized it because I had previously spent several months searching for it, without any success. And there it was, right in front of me, for $10.

I knew Al Carmines through some of his others works, namely Promenade and Peace. Despite the fact that Carmines wrote over 30 musicals in his time, only 8 were ever recorded. At that point, only Promenade had been digitized (Peace has just recently hit streaming platforms). By this time, I had managed to get my hands on 6 of the 8 recordings. Of the two remaining, Joan was the one I was itching to find (Pomegranada, I’m told, is not his finest work. Still, if you have a copy you’re willing to part with, I will gladly take it from you).

Written in 1970, Joan is set in then-contemporary Greenwich Village. It ostensibly focuses on the final days of Joan of Arc, though its connection to the real-life saint is indistinct. The play opens with a young radical woman named Joan throwing a bomb at a government building, in protest of the Vietnam war. She immediately questions her reasoning for doing so and poses,

The reasons why you're going to do something disappear when you actually do it. Because by doing it you change. You become something you weren't before; the action has become part of you. And then you need reasons for what you are, not what you do.

It is this thought that haunts Joan and drives her through the rest of the play. In trying to understand and discover herself, she journeys through New York, and eventually meets The Virgin Mary. The relationship that forms between Joan and Mary is vague to say the least. But given that near all Carmines musicals deal with Queer themes, and that the actors portraying Joan and Mary (Lee Guilliatt and Essie Borden) would eventually marry one another…I will let you draw your own conclusions.

Suffice to say, Joan is a unique piece of musical theatre. When I brought the record home, I initially listened to the first half, paused to come back to it later, and promptly let it collect dust for 8 months. When I did eventually return to it, I was struck by how the themes still rang true to me as a young Queer person living in America over 50 years later. I was so compelled by the music and the story that I was ready to get in the car and drive to the next production of Joan, wherever it may be. But Joan hadn’t been produced in any capacity since 1975. It had never even gone into licensing. I realized that if anyone was going bring this musical to life again, it was going to be me.

In somewhat of a blur, I sent an email to the folks at Judson Memorial Church, where Carmines had worked as a minister, as well as the leader of the attached theatre, The Judson Poets Theatre (more on that later). Near all of Carmines’ works premiered there. While nobody at Judson held the rights to Joan, they kindly put me in touch with Al Carmine’s brother, Ted, who is the sole proprietor of his estate. Ted graciously gave me permission to remount Joan for free, as long as I didn’t charge people for admission. So, within 48 hours of listening through all of Joan, I had a agreed to bring it back to life. Yet, I still didn’t quite understand what I was about to undertake.

Ted didn’t have the script or the score, so it was up to me to find them. Still, I wasn’t perturbed. I have experience with research libraries and archives, and surely they were out there somewhere. Judson had no copies. Neither did the New York Public Library or the Library of Congress. I was able to track down Ira Siff, who played one of Joan’s love interests in the original production, but he didn’t have them either. For the time being, the remaining living cast members proved elusive.

Eventually, the script turned up at Kent State University in Ohio. It wound up there when a student named Jay Fields collected it for his dissertation on Al Carmines in the 1980s. Still, no score.

At some point it became apparent that the score never existed to begin with. Carmines didn’t write music, and played everything by ear. When teaching music, he sat down in front of the piano with the cast, normally with some lyrics he wrote the night before scribbled down on a napkin, and taught the music section by section. Carmines typically played the piano himself for performances, so there was never any need to write it down.

Now, this could have easily been a dead end. Luckily, my partner, Nathan, is an incredibly gifted music director. When it became obvious that the score didn’t exist anywhere on paper, he began to transcribe the entire score by ear, note by note. To be clear, this project would have been absolutely impossible without Nathan’s ability to hear a 50 year old scratchy record and produce pages like this: