JACK’S TALE - an original musical by Scot Copeland and Paul Carrol Binkley had its national debut at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in February of 2015. The work was a co-commission that facilitated and energized an artistic collaboration between The Kennedy Center and Nashville Children’s Theatre, culminating in multiple performances in both venues. Below are the original author’s notes from the pre-published script:
NOTES
There are ten characters in the play. The original production used four actors using this doubling pattern:
Jack
Will, King’s Daughter
Tom, Beggar, Old King
Mama, Blue-Beard Giant, Old Woman, Raggedy Bones
The narrative lines in the script are assigned as they were in the original production. If you use a different doubling pattern (or no doubling) feel free to re-assign narrative lines to other actors, but try to keep the story theatre convention of a character narrating his/her own actions while performing the action. There is no inherent Scots-Irish dramatic tradition, but we are prodigious storytellers from away back.
Keep respect. This is a little epic story about a people who tamed the wilds of Scotland, carved fertile farmland out of the rocks of Ireland, and provided the backbone of the American Revolution. We are not HeeHaw. We push frontiers, we fight wars, we throw off kings, we refuse to kneel to God because we are certain that He wants us to look Him in the eye. We get right angry when others make fun of us, but we do love to make fun of ourselves. Don’t tell Jack’s Tale from the outside. [End of Scot’s Notes]
Unfortunately for all of us, we lost Scot in February of 2016. As one of his frequent collaborators, I was asked to share some thoughts with the Nashville Scene for use in their tribute.
I first met Scot when we were independently hired to work on a production of Dark of the Moon for Center Stage at Austin Peay State University. He was directing and I was composing and music directing. (Incidentally, his wife, Rene was in the cast.) It was the summer of 1990. We have been collaborating ever since. Many years, we worked together on entire seasons of productions, but even when I was otherwise engaged, we always managed to find a window of opportunity. It was not uncommon for me to fly in from a performance with Alabama at some arena in order to make a production meeting or performance at Nashville Children’s Theatre. Even as I was under a burdensome contract as a music row executive, I found ways to check in with Scot on his work. For 26 years, exactly half of my life (and certainly the majority of my professional life), Scot Copeland was always there, somewhere, on my calendar. There was never enough money, and never the promise of any big time success, only the certainty that if Scot was doing it, it was worth doing. He possessed the rare personality of a control freak who could completely relinquish control in service of the story. I always knew that he would trust me to create something that he could react to in ways that would raise the bar. I also trusted him enough to know that he would not allow mediocrity to survive beyond tech. This allowed everyone to fail along the way without damaging the story in the end.
I was privileged to compose scores for several of Scot’s original scripts, but the one that stands out is Jack’s Tale. This was, in many ways, Scot’s life’s work. It is an epic journey for Jack that encapsulates the Scots-Irish immigration to the “new ground.” These were Scot’s people and he was passionately searching for the perfect way to celebrate his heritage while using their voices to impart his philosophy of life. To this end, he had worked on the script for twelve years before bringing me on board to help him make a musical out of it. Together, we workshopped it for over eleven years, producing multiple small runs for audiences at NCT before receiving a co-commission from The Kennedy Center to premier the work in the winter of 2015.
As I was thinking about what to say about Scot (and Jack), I thought of some lyrics that Scot wrote. They sum up, for me, where Scot was coming from. When Jack leaves home to seek his fortune, his mama sends him off with two pans of cornbread. Along the way, Jack meets an old beggar man who hasn’t eaten “since the moon was new.” Of course Jack gives the man one of his pans of cornbread. Next, he encounters an old woman on the road, and he tears off half of his remaining pan of cornbread and gives it to her, and starts to walk on… but then he stops… and comes back, then sings:
Hey Grandma,
Well I ain’t been fair to you,
I give an old man a whole pan of cornbread
And I only give you half…
Here’s the other half.
The more he shared… the more there appeared to be. This is what I will always remember about Scot Copeland.
peace, pcb