What if members of the Beatles had happened on a church choir planning to tell the Easter story? How would they have affected it?
The Ecclesia Baptist Church, 15 Spivey Lake Road, Fairview, N.C., is answering the question today with the original musical "Jesus Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah," which will be presented at 5 p.m. ET today at their church, its final performance this year. The event today, although after Easter, is still in the church's Easter season.
Stan Dotson, who wrote the play, told us, "Well, this was my idea. I have these quirky ways of making connections between the two soundtracks that run in my head, which are the old hymns that I grew up with in the Baptist Church and the classic rock I grew up with in the '60s and '70s."
The story, he says, involves four guys named Johnny, Paulie, Georgie and Ringo. "The platform of the story is what would have happened in 1957 if these four young guys had come into a church right when it was starting to practice this Easter musical and how would it have changed the way the story was told."
The original idea of doing the musical, Dotson says, originally came from a documentary called "Young@Heart." (See the trailer for the film in the video below.) "It's a documentary about this senior citizen center up in New England somewhere where the guy would come in and do sing-a-longs with the seniors started bringing in a rock n' roll band and teaching them rock songs, classic rock and contemporary. And they just loved it and wound up going on the road. And they made this documentary and some of our folks said, 'Why can't we do something like that?'"
The idea for the Beatles musical actually sprang from an earlier one done at the church, Dotson says. "I wrote a musical for Christmas that was called 'Experience: Christmas -- the Story of Jesus' Birth through the Music of Jimi Hendrix.' It was such a blast. The people who did it in our church said, 'What's next?' Are we going to do the Beatles? That just got me thinking."
The cast for the Beatles musical includes all ages, he says. "We have kids as young as 12 and older folks up to their mid-to-late '70s and all in between. And they just have a blast doing it. So there's a script that ties the lyrics of the Beatles songs and the hymns to the story of the last week of Jesus' life. And it all works. It's an amazing kind of quirky thing."
Dotson says it's likely after today's final performance the musical will be repeated next year. And the church has two more in the works. "The next one's going to be Motown. It's the Exodus Story and it's sort of Mosestown/Motown. So it'll be telling the Exodus story through Motown music," he says. And there's another planned for Lent next year. "It'll be Lent through the music of the Rolling Stones," he says.
Admission to today's performance is free, though donations will be accepted for a partner church in Cuba, where Dotson noted, there is a park dedicated to John Lennon.
The trailer for the documentary "Young@Heart."
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Must be 12 o'clock.......i hear the coo-coo......
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