What's happened to Amazing Grace the musical?

In the May 1 issue of WORLD Magazine I happily wrote about a triumph of perseverance. After about 18 years of writing and rewriting, planning and publicizing, the dream of former church youth director and policeman Chris Smith—a gifted amateur composer and lyricist—was coming true. His musical Amazing Grace about the life John Newton was about to open on Broadway at the famous Nederlander Theatre.

I haven’t seen the stupendously staged Broadway version (see the video clip below for highlights), complete with an underwater scene, but I have heard the songs, and I like them. Sadly, many critics have panned the musical. Some of the negative reviews may spring from an anti-Christian bias, since the message that God saves sinners is implicit in the story. But the bad reviews have had an impact. On the other hand, some comments on social media have been favorable, and theatergoers have walked out onto 41st Street with tears in their eyes.

One of the better reviewers, Terry Teachout of The Wall Street Journal, wrote last month, “New musicals that open in the summer tend to be ill-fated, and Amazing Grace … is unlikely to break that rule. It’s not so much a musical as an antislavery pageant.” Teachout did not like the earnestness of the presentation, and wrote, “This is the kind of musical in which the actors are required to say things like ‘It could be that you were given your gifts for just such a time as this’ with straight faces.”

That, of course, is a good biblical sentence from the book of Esther, and one we all should keep in mind: Are we more interested in preserving our own skins or taking risks to help others? But I can see why such a line would not go over with older folks who have seen it all and younger ones raised on snarkiness. Earnestness is suspect these days, and the bottom line is the bottom line: Unless Amazing Grace sells a lot more tickets by the end of this month, it is likely to face Broadway euthanasia.

Such a result would be a huge disappointment to Smith and his backers, but Teachout concluded his review this way: “I can’t imagine that Amazing Grace will last long on Broadway, but it’s a perfect fit for the drama departments of Christian high schools and colleges, where it will doubtless have a profitable afterlife.” That’s a put-down, of course, but lots of drama programs want to move beyond Godspell and other stalwarts. It would be wonderful to have such a story of grace told in hundreds of venues.