Take a Swing for the Fences, Elmer!

Billy striking a powerful pose during
a promotional photo shoot.

Signature Theatre’s 25^th Anniversary Season is swinging for the fences with its next musical, Elmer Gantry. Under the direction of our very own Artistic Director, Eric Schaeffer, Gantry is set to step up to the plate and knock another musical out of the park for this amazing season. The cast and production team feature a cavalcade of old Signature favorites and energize the show with a familiar spirit and energy that is sure to delight audiences.

In the title role, Charlie Pollock, of Broadway’s Violet, leads the charge as he whips Sister Sharon Falconer’s revival troupe into a well-oiled preaching machine. Pollock’s character in the show is not entirely fictitious. Based largely off of popular early 20^th century baseball-player-turned-preacher Billy Sunday, Elmer’s character is rich in history, personality, and bravado.

Billy “The Evangelist” Sunday

Born into poverty on November 19, 1862, Sunday grew up in at the Soldiers' Orphans' Home in Davenport, Iowa. At the orphanage, Sunday obtained a decent primary education and the realization that he was a skilled athlete.

Billy in his National League uniform
from his baseball days.

In 1880, Sunday relocated to Marshalltown, Iowa, where he played for the town baseball team. His professional baseball career was launched in 1883, when, A.G. Spalding, the president of the Chicago White Stockings, signed Sunday. He would play in the majors for eight years and was among the league leaders in stolen bases.

During one of his final seasons in the majors, Sunday began attending a local Presbyterian Church. In the spring of 1891, Sunday turned down a baseball contract for $3,500 a year to accept a position with the Chicago YMCA at $83 per month. For three years, Sunday visited the sick, prayed with the troubled, counseled the suicidal, and visited saloons to invite patrons to evangelistic meetings.

In 1896, Sunday struck out on his own. For the next twelve years Sunday preached in approximately seventy communities, most of them in Iowa and Illinois. Towns often booked Sunday meetings informally, sometimes by sending a delegation to hear him preach and then telegraphing him while he was holding services somewhere else.

As his popularity grew,  Sunday was welcomed into the circle of the social, economic, and political elite. He counted among his neighbors and acquaintances several prominent businessmen. Sunday dined with numerous politicians, including Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and counted both Herbert Hoover and John D. Rockefeller, Jr. as friends.

As far as his religious stance went, Billy Sunday was a conservative evangelical who accepted fundamentalist doctrines. His sermons were clear, loud, and often stressed the failures of the sinful and how they will come to be punished for straying from the way of the Lord.

Elmer Gantry opens October 7^th and runs until November 9^th in the MAX Theatre.  For more information please visit our website or call the box office at 703-820-9771. Follow along with Elmer Gantry on social media with #SigGantry

Billy Sunday is captured preaching in this lithograph by artist George Bellows

Read More

That Old Time Religion

Charlie Pollock is our Elmer Gantry.

Up next on the docket for the Signature Theatre 25^th Anniversary Season is the updated version of Elmer Gantry, which features an updated book and brand new music! This revised musical is being directed by Signature Theatre’s very own Artistic Director Eric Schaeffer and features a fiery and talented cast and production team.

The basis for Elmer Gantry comes to the MAX Theatre stage from its source novel (also titled Elmer Gantry) by early 20^th century writer Sinclair Lewis. Sinclair was a novelist and playwright whose wit, wry sense of humor, and striking observations about the American way of life earned him a Nobel Prize in Literature. (The first American writer to do so in 1930.)

For those of you unfamiliar with Lewis’s novel, Elmer Gantry focuses around the charismatic title character as he stumbles upon a struggling religious tour led by the pious sister Sharon Falconer. As Elmer ingratiates himself in the tour and the hearts of those around him, trouble is not far behind his revival meetings’ trail.

Revival Meetings

Famous preacher Billy Sunday preaching to
followers in one of his largest revival meetings.

A revival meeting is a Christian religious service held to inspire active members of a church body to gain new converts. A revival is ideally a renewed, radical commitment to Jesus Christ empowered by the Holy Spirit. The true, blue revival often results in dynamic evangelism, conversions, worship, purity, joy, fellowship, obedience, peace, fulfillment, and devotion in the life of the believer. (A good time for the churchgoer and an even better time for the church in the long run.)

The meeting itself usually consists of several consecutive nights of services conducted at the same time and location. This is most often in a building belonging to the sponsoring congregation but sometimes a rented assembly hall or pitched tent organized by a visiting group or preacher. The meeting often features a variety of performances and speakers, from fire and brimstone preachers to angelic choirs, live bands, faith healings and religious stage plays.

This event, with its new and eclectic style of sermons and delivery of the gospel, helped breathe new life into the American people and how they practiced religion. Their basic rituals, piety, and self-awareness changed as this form of religious expression gained steam and support throughout the early 20th century.

Instead of passively listening to religious discourse and lectures in detached manners, the American people began to be passionately and emotionally involved in their religion, fully investing themselves in the pageantry, spectacle, and spirit that revival meetings brought to their communities. This full investment in the power of religion brought individual Christians that much closer to God and Christ and made them all the more likely to continue to attend, participate, assist and donate to the church.

Elmer Gantry opens October 7^th and runs until November 9^th in the MAX Theatre.  For more information please visit our website or call the box office at 703-820-9771. Follow along with Elmer Gantry on social media with #SigGantry

Read More