Leading the creative team is DC composer Ronald "Trey" Walton III. The new project marks Walton’s second commission by New Music-Theatre. Walton’s music draws from classical music traditions and training, but he also has an ear tuned to the rhythms and energy of today’s young audiences.

Music Director Evelyn Simpson Curenton, a nationally revered musician who has worked with opera superstars including Kathleen Battle and Jessye Norman and who is steeped in the tradition of historic Black church music, will also lead piano/vocal score workshop readings and an open orchestral workshop.

We are happy to announce our partnership with Dr. Anita Gonzalez, director, writer and choreographer, and professor and Head of the Arts Department at Georgetown University.

Several of our cast members and their characters have continued on this journey with New Music-Theatre, invested fully in sharing an important story through the transformative power of music-theatre. We are proud to have singer-actors Sheri Jackson, Djob Lyons, Cara Schaefer, and Yvette Spears continue with us on this journey as collaborators as well as to Louis Cleare II and Daniel Smith who join the cast.

Alongside the creative development will be a long-term commitment to interactive education. Partners in our consortium will develop content for an educational unit about local Black genealogy for Middle and High School students to extend the learning following the performances. Students will have the opportunity to engage in further archival research, retrieving names and stories of those lying in the Georgetown Black cemeteries and have their work published online.

The story will include scenes, many taken directly from historic records. Alfred Pope and his wife Hannah, reunited after The Pearl Affair and manumitted, took up residence on P Street in Georgetown, where the house still stands. Pope helped many others gain their freedom and later spoke in front of Congress. Along with his friend and fellow elder, Hezekiah Turner, at Mount Zion Church, they became two of the very first African American males to cast their votes in a national election. Their stories will be woven together with others like Jacob Ross from Kentucky, who was ordained by the Methodist Church while still enslaved, but when manumitted came to live in Georgetown with his wife and became an itinerant preacher well-known around the area’s church circuit. Mary Burrell was not only a leader of a female benevolent society (FUBS) but a teacher at Sumner School for Coloreds. Much of the music will be original, but some melodies may be found in old hymnals in Mount Zion’s archives.