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An Opera about the Life of John F. Kennedy
Music by Will Holt
Book and Lyrics by
Tom Sawyer & Will Holt
Based on an original concept by
Tom Sawyer
JACK began its birthing process in 1982. That’s when it finally fully struck Screen/TV Writer Tom Sawyer how very much more than JFK had died that day in Dallas, and that it was time to make a statement about what we had – and what we’d lost. With that realization came a vision, a certainty that it needed to be done musically, not as an historical pageant but rather as a personal drama. Nor could it be done as conventional musical theater, but rather that it must be presented in that most emotionally powerful of theatrical forms: Opera. Sung through.
Composer/Lyricist Will Holt came on board, bringing with him the same passions about the subject, and work began. Neither dreamt that completing the first Act would require 7 years, much of that time a learning curve as the pair came to truly understand who Jack Kennedy was, and what their show was really about. They found it not in the words of the many books they read about him, but rather from the Jack Kennedy and other players who emerged as they were writing them. Not unlike the process of writing fiction, it required listening to their characters – and what they told Holt and Sawyer was that this, more than anything else, was the almost Shakespearean story of a complex, deeply conflicted yet loving relationship – between an obsessed, profoundly driven father, and his near-textbook second son – and how that young man, in overcoming those and other challenges, would ultimately provoke his own assassination.
JACK premiered on May 7, 1993 at the Goodspeed Opera House’s Norma Terris Theater in Connecticut. And when the lights went up that night, virtually the entire audience was was in tears.
The show received a second production in 1995, featuring Broadway performers in the lead roles, at the University of Oklahoma, and another in 1997 at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin, Ireland. The first commercial recording of JACK, published by Original Cast Records, is the version performed in Connecticut.
JACK Synopsis:
Beginning with John F. Kennedy’s days at Harvard, circa 1937, through his assassination in Dallas, JACK dramatizes – in song and movement – his life, growth, his bonds with siblings, his mother, Rose, and her father, while focusing on the central conflict in his life – Jack’s fight to become his own man despite a difficult, painfully ambivalent relationship with his powerful, obsessed father. Here, at its core, JACK deals with the young man’s reactions, his life-choices resulting from Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr.’s pressures on him, from birth, to play second fiddle to his firstborn brother, Joe, Jr. who, their father had ordained, was to become the first Catholic President of the U.S.
From the family’s time in Europe while his father served as FDR’s ambassador to the UK, on through Jack’s military service, we see the older man’s often ruthless interference in his second son’s life in order to prevent possible embarrassment to Joe, Jr. And then, following Joe, Jr.’s death in WWII, Joe, Sr.’s ironic insistence that Jack take his brother’s place by entering politics. And as ACT ONE ends, JACK chronicles John Kennedy’s decision to run for Congress, while resisting his father’s ongoing attempts to control him.
From Jack’s romance with Jacqueline Bouvier, their marital difficulties due to his philandering, on through his successful campaign for the Presidency, JACK - ACT TWO conveys the magic of their presence, the idealism he shared with his younger brother, Bobby, how it – and they – dazzled, and began to change this Country in positive ways.
And all the while the father’s links with the forces of darkness cast longer and longer shadows, until they, combined with Jack’s crossing of lines, among them the Bay of Pigs, Civil Rights, and his decision to begin our withdrawal from Vietnam, finally resulted in his murder – an event that continues to resonate for all of us, marking as it did not just the end of Camelot, but the beginning of the end of much, much more.
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