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Esther

2000 · Triopia High School

Esther — billed in some of Ken Bradbury's notes as Viva Esther — is an original musical Bradbury wrote and directed for Triopia High School in the spring of 2000. It takes one of the Bible's bravest and most unlikely heroes and drops her story into the middle of a modern street war. The action opens in "the Hood" of a city, on the turf of the Persian gang, where an explosion of drums and a flash of dance erupts into a full-blown gang war between the Persians and the Hebreos, a Latino gang. When both gangs are hauled off to "Baby-Lon," the city's juvenile detention facility, they find themselves locked up together — taunting, scuffling, and circling each other behind a chain-link fence — until a frightened, out-of-place young man named Michael appears in their midst and, risking everything, begins to tell them the ancient story of Esther.

It is, as Bradbury described it, a show within a show: through Michael's retelling, the gang members become the characters of the old story — King Xerxes, Queen Vashey, Mordachai, and Esther herself — and two warring races slowly come to understand and appreciate one another. Bradbury chose the obscure Book of Esther deliberately. "It's a darned good story," he wrote in his program notes — "love, jealousy, anger, war, retribution, and enough plot twists to hold even the attention of the Fox network's audience." But his deeper reason was the one he pressed on his cast at the first rehearsal: the children onstage would raise their own children in a country where no race would be a majority, and Esther had faced racial prejudice "in the only effective way: by personal sacrifice, by personal courage." The world of street gangs, he felt, was the right setting to retell such a story of strife.

The show carried Bradbury's characteristic warmth and conviction. "Gang members are not born evil," he told the cast. "Gangs fill a need — a vacuum that's been left in their lives. Don't play these people as something unreal. They're very real. But for the grace of God, they are you, and they are me." First-night rehearsals were marked by a moment the director never forgot: Julie Surratt standing alone in the March gymnasium singing "Little Girl Lost," and the whole room breaking into spontaneous applause. When she landed the title role, he wrote, no one was more surprised than she.

Musical Numbers

Act I

Act II

Cast

Production Notes

Esther was an entirely original work — book, music, and lyrics by Ken Bradbury — written and directed for the Triopia High School all-school musical in the spring of 2000. The band included Jill, Kurt, Jon Carls, Jerry Kirbach, and Mr. West; choreography was led by Callie and friends with the director, with Amanda Meyer serving as assistant choreographer.

Bradbury's surviving production journal, titled "You Go, Girl!", chronicles the show's creation through the winter of 2000. He wrestled for weeks between two ideas — a play about Joshua and a play about Esther — outlining, scrapping, and rewriting opening songs, prompted along the way by late-night emails, a friend's history of the Jewish enslavement gathered "during the din of the State Tournament," and friends who stopped by to pray with him for the show. The cast of roughly thirty drew on a community of student performers, many of them veterans of Bradbury's earlier Triopia productions such as Into the Light, The Time of My Life, and Children of the Rainbow. As he reminded them, he wrote these shows "mainly to get as many of you onstage as possible," in a program he had been directing at Triopia for some thirty years — and which had become, in his words, the only high school show in the state that sold out every year.