About
Bible the Musical is a band dedicated to adapting Bible stories to musical theatre with a strong emphasis on culture, history, and composition. It is founded in 2020 by Benjamin, a film composer and musical theatre enthusiast.
Culture
The adaptations will be written through a lens of the culture in the Biblical passages on which they are based. As many cultural details will be included to embellish the adaptation. The stage design and props will incorporate designs that reflect the designs in the time of the story. Even the design of the curtains are considered. Effort will be put into considering all these little details. This is part of the world-building process that we aspire to execute.
History
In order to be faithful to the Biblical passages, rewrites and additions to the original story will be avoided. Creativity will be present in the interpretation and the lyrics and script will be based on exegesis, drawing out as much as possible from the passages, even if it is a few lines. Fast for Me (The Act 1 Finale for Esther: Queen of Persia ) is based on Esther 4:14-17 (only 3 verses), but turned out to be over 6 minutes long! Another song from Esther, Sage Advice, is based on Esther 1:13-20 (7 verses) and is not too long —just 5 minutes. We put much thought into pacing the adaptation to make sense music-theatrically.
Composition
The Music
The music and songs will be founded upon solid music composition principles, with much thought put into it. Themes and leitmotifs are created for various characters situations, making the adaptation resound poetically and musically. Certain themes even span across works in the Bible the Musical family of musicals. The music aims to be timeless, unique, and memorable, like the stories told.
The music will include cultural styles from the time period of the story if relevant, fusing them with modern style to make it relevant musically and theatrically. Esther: Queen of Persia takes a lot of inspiration from —that’s right —Persian music —and Jewish music as well, as it has a more cultural focus! On the other hand, our newer work-in-progress, Job the Musical, would not have many cultural music references, as the ideas and story in Job span across cultures and times, so a cinematic and epic operatic musical format would be used; let’s see how that turns out!
The Instruments
The music and pieces will aim to be historical and cultural as much as it serves the story and purpose. Sage Advice from Esther: Queen of Persia features a qanun for a major part. And in the opening number Feast of Persia from the same musical, drums with origin in Persia and surrounding regions were added, i.e. Bendir, Darbuka, Dohol, Dohola, Riq, and Tombak! Listen to a sample below:
Image by afropolski who himself recorded percussion for Feast of Persia!
The Lyrics
The lyrics are written in less casual way, avoiding slang, in order to preserve the timelessness of it all. Rhyme and meter are kept to keep it catchy and easily follow-able and pleasant to sing. Again, rewrites and additions to the original story, thinking about it, are not necessary considering the creativity we are able to use with the musical format, as compared to non-musical TV or movie script. So the lyrics can easily stay faithful to the original passages whilst being clothed with fresh and new musical ideas.
Accessiblity
Not everyone has a qanun, a tar, or an oud, which plays microtones. Keeping this in mind, microtones are avoided in the compositions, for now, as they cannot be played on more mainstream instruments such as the guitar and the piano. We want to make it easy to stage too, even for just an ensemble of a handful of musicians. However, to keep the historical vibe of Esther: Queen of Persia, the guitar shall be the main instrument. In fact, the show is built in a way that a very skilled flamenco guitar virtuoso could carry the instrumental of the whole show on their back. Of course, the addition of a violinist would be great. A cajonist would be ideally added as well, forming a trio for low-budget productions. High budget productions should have a fuller ensemble, of the likes of Sami Yusuf and Rastak.
Image from Trio Cajon, Guitar & Violin live (Las Locas) - Heidi Joubert, Edina Balczo Jam
The Vision
The Bible contains some of the most epic and meaningful stories ever told, but rarely are they adapted to film, music, and media.
For example, if you do a search on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), there are 32,057 titles based on a novel, 6,300 based on a true story, 395 based on Greek mythology, but only 118 based on the Bible, with 17 of them being musicals.
This means out of 74,963 musicals (on IMDb), only 17 musicals are based on the Bible.
Right now, the most popular Biblical musical is the 1998 film Prince of Egypt (which recently was adapted to stage), and take a look at the some Youtube comments about it (and the number of upvotes):
