10/28/2025
After more than 40 years as a musical theatre performer, I just closed my first serious drama. Playing Rebecca Nurse in The Crucible didn't just challenge me as an actor, it opened my eyes to something I'd somehow missed in four decades on stage.
I have always loved musical theatre. I've experienced its transformative power firsthand, when playing Mrs. Banks in Mary Poppins, a woman who lived in the shadows for years before finally finding and using her voice. Musicals can express what words alone sometimes cannot. They offer a particular magic that happens when story and song become one.
The Crucible did something different. Without the release that music provides, the audience sat with the weight of every word. The tension built and built. When Giles Corey cracked a joke, this honest, blunt man offered a moment of levity, the laughter that erupted wasn't just appreciation of the humor. It was release.
Rebecca Nurse was a real woman. Well respected, honest. She was accused of witchcraft in 1692 and hanged because she refused to confess to a lie. It took many years for her name to be cleared. Speaking her truth night after night, I felt the relevance of Arthur Miller's comparisons. He wrote it during the McCarthy era, when accusation was evidence and fear silenced truth. But standing on that stage in 2025, the parallels to our own lives were impossible to ignore.
We live in a time when the line between truth and lies has become dangerously blurred. When people don't trust what they hear. When self preservation can overtake integrity. We've been here before in history. Salem, McCarthy, The AIDS epidemic and countless other moments when fear made us forget our better selves, when we chose to find a scapegoat. We always hope we'll learn, but somehow history keeps repeating itself.
This is why live theatre matters. Not just as entertainment, though joy and escape have their place, but as a mirror. As a reckoning. As a space where we sit together in the dark and confront uncomfortable truths we might otherwise avoid.
When you watch a musical, you leave humming. When you watch The Crucible, you leave haunted. Both are powerful, but now, we need the haunting too.
We need art that doesn't let us look away while we sit in rooms and gasp and laugh at the same moments, and leave asking ourselves the hard questions.
As we sit on the edge of the next major shift in our society with AI, the humanity that theatre brings will be essential for our children to learn. Be an advocate for theatre programs in your schools, be open to presenting plays and musicals that push us to think. Take your children to see live theatre.
Have you experienced moments in live theater that have moved you or changed the way you think? I would love to hear your thoughts on this!
Photo Credit: Shealyn Jae Photography
