Welcome to Summerhaven, my second full-length musical play. Feel free to experience the play by listening to the demos and following along with the interactive book or piano/vocal score.

SYNOPSIS…

Inspired by true events, Summerhaven is a musical play about Marcus Doran, an educator at a free school in the suburbs of Paris who educates young children using an esoteric method that utilizes rhythm, song, storytelling, and movement. A doting single father, Marcus must fight to keep his daughter as his method and his worldview come under fire when the local commission scholaire steps in to investigate the school.

At the moment, the script and the piano/vocal score are in their “draft for now” form. I suspect both will undergo many revisions on the journey toward a fully realized performance.

THE MAKING OF SUMMERHAVEN

I got the idea for Summerhaven in around 2010 after reading about a “democratic free school” in England called Summerhill, where the local school board tried to shut the school down after the students tested poorly on state exams.

Although Summerhill survived the incident and is still open today, its story touched me personally, having experienced a very similar situation in 2010 to 2013 while working as a Montessori teacher at the Rhein-Main International Montessori school in Friedrichsdorf, Germany. The local German school board didn’t just try to shut down our little Montessori school for the very same reasons; they succeeded.

Even as Summerhaven synthesizes these two real-life events, it attempts to go further in spotlighting a valuable debate between the forces of spirituality and the forces of reason in the realm of education (not that there is any debate). Current events both in the country where I was born, the United States, where debates rage about what to teach children––creationism or evolution, a whitewashed version of U.S. history, or critical race theory––and in the country where I live, France, where the government is moving to shut down private schools altogether in an attempt to nationalize education, make this conversation particularly relevant.

And while the educational method I invented (more about that below) satirizes the dark, silly, and dangerous side of spirituality, religious dogma, and unsupported belief, especially in the arena of children’s education, in equal measure it touches on the benefits of out-of-the-box thinking in education. I have my personal opinion about which educational approach best serves children, but the best art best serves the public not with a sermon, but with a conversation. In my favorite dramatic works, the author’s position takes a back seat to the characters’ positions, and the audience benefits from watching strong characters in opposition duke it out.

In the end, I hope Summerhaven leaves audiences questioning and discussing whether the developmental, constructivist, spiritual approach, or the scientific, subject-logic, rational approach benefits children more, or whether the best approach synthesizes both. The fictional Sacred Lotus Flower method–the fruit of months of research into all manner of alternative education methods, including Montessori, Waldorf, Reggio Emilia, and Unschooling–synthesizes constructivist, “alternative” methods of education.

Specifically, the method takes all of the “woo” aspects of Montessori, namely, the stated aim of “human development,” and the bizarre and fanciful–albeit scientifically accurate–“Cosmic Stories,” and tosses them up in a tasty salad with the most batshit crazy aspects of Waldorf–with which Waldorf is positively lousy. Whether it be the lack of early academics, the gnomes and demons, the racist underpinnings, reincarnation, the supposed “effect” of colors on children’s “spiritual growth,” and their bizarre practice of moving, singing, and dancing in long colored robes, Waldorf offers low-hanging fruit for the hungry satirical mind.

These ideas, combined with elements from Buddhism and other “woo” and New Age practices, in particular the questionable (read: silly) teachings of the “spiritual teacher” G.I. Gurdieff, form the building blocks for Marcus’s method.

It seemed to me that an educational method based on singing, dance, and movement would integrate naturally into the context of a musical play, so I took the texts from Montessori and Waldorf lesson manuals and adapted them into lyrics for the musical numbers in which Marcus gives the children lessons in the form of “Cosmic Stories,” lessons such as “How It All Began,” “Four Little Horses,” “The Threefold Human Being and the Animal Kingdom,” and “The Four Kingdoms,” Parts 1, 2, and 3. Some of the choreography I borrowed from Waldorf eurythmy, as well as from Anglo-American and Afro-American children’s folk songs and singing games that I learned as a practitioner of the Kodály method of music education.

Once I had fleshed out Marcus’s pedagogical method, I began forming the story in 2015, using the Dramatica framework, Fabula storytelling cards, and Dan Harmon’s Story Circle as my guides. In 2015 I put the writing on hold in order to continue to develop my first musical play Success! (Available for perusal here.) After finishing the graphic novel version of Success! in March of 2020, I finished draft 15 of Summerhaven. I then spent much of 2021 composing the songs and writing the piano and vocal score. Over the past several months, many people have read and contributed feedback to the ever-evolving script and songs, resulting in many revisions.

In 2021, after extensive revisions coached by my good friend (and practically uncle) Tom Maduel (screenwriter filmmaker of such gems as A One-sided Affair and the forthcoming Amanda Wilde series), Summerhaven made the semifinal round of selections at the O’Neil Theater’s National Music Theater Conference, 2022! We’re on pins and needles here at RHQ to find out what’s going to happen next.

As of March, 2022, I finished recording the demos and uploaded the “for now” draft of the book and score here for your perusal. I hope you enjoy it.

FEEDBACK

If you’d like to help make Summerhaven the best play it can be, feel free to check out the script and send along any feedback or comments you might have. Whether you’re a professional writer or just an enthusiast, I welcome any and all feedback as I work toward a final draft and a live performance.