As Darwin student Kaely Michels-Gualtieri prepares for the opening night of her new musical, she’s no stranger to an audience. Before pivoting to her current combination of academia and musical theatre, she maintained a dazzling career as a trapeze artist, performing with both Ringling Brothers and Cirque du Soleil. But her next act is a passion project that brings together her love of history, musicals and the circus under one sparkly tent.
Barnum. Booth. Lincoln. explores the friendship between the 19th century showman and politician P.T. Barnum, and President Abraham Lincoln, as well as the theatrical careers of Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, and his older brother Edwin. Its initial spark came from a class Kaely took on American Presidents while an undergraduate at Brown University.
“I had no idea that Abraham Lincoln was shot by an actor,” she says now.
“The stuff that everybody learns in second grade in America had gone straight over my head. I was, like, ‘President Lincoln was shot in a theatre? Why is there no play about that?!’ Immediately it seemed so, so theatrical. And then in the next class it came up that P.T. Barnum was really good friends with Abraham Lincoln. And I performed in his show! That was the contract that launched my career, and I had no idea. Once I connected that P.T. Barnum was invited to the White House all the time to hang out with Lincoln, I kept thinking ‘what kind of conversation would Lincoln and P.T. Barnum have during the Civil War in the White House?’ Did he help draft the Emancipation Proclamation? I kept imagining – what do these legendary men talk about?”
Further research only served to cement the idea that this was the story Kaely was meant to tell, from the discovery that John Wilkes Booth was both a famous actor, but also nowhere near as famous as his older brother Edwin; to the fact that Edwin Booth and his father had performed Hamlet in Barnum’s museum. When she arrived in Cambridge to pursue an MPhil in American History, her work continued to propel the show’s development.
“My dissertation is the academic version of this play! One informs the other.”
Having completed a version of the script as a play, Kaely won a grant from Brown to workshop it professionally last summer in Washington DC, where it sold out at the city’s fringe festival. But, despite her proclaimed lack of musical talent, her ultimate ambition for the show was always in musical form. After working with Hughes Hall Law student Chi Wai Hu on The 24 Hour Musical, a challenge set by the University’s Musical Theatre Society, a collaboration was born.
“My goal was to find somebody who was as magical as Chi to help me turn it into a musical. He’s made it infinitely better, in the best way possible. It’s been incredible, because I’ve had all these ideas, but I’ve been so inside of it, especially because I’ve done so much archival research. Chi’s helped me to be like ‘ok, I know you know all these facts, but not everybody else is spending all their time deep in the archives of Baltimore’.”
The minutiae of the facts may not be common knowledge, but the show will reach an audience raised on The Greatest Showman’s retelling of the P.T. Barnum story, and primed by Hamilton for musical interpretation of American history. Oh Mary’s recent transfer from Broadway to the West End has demonstrated the appetite for offbeat riffing on Lincoln’s life, while Six, the musical based on Henry VIII’s wives and currently selling out in theatres around the world, was developed by Cambridge students in 2017 and began life at the Edinburgh Fringe.
Six, in particular, provided a direct source of inspiration.
“My family have been going to Edinburgh forever – instead of going to the beach we go to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival every summer. So I saw Six in its infancy and that was when I was when I was like ‘oh my God, this came from Cambridge, I must go to Cambridge.’ And now we’re going to the Fringe this summer. So seeing Six inspired a lot of this.”
As the show has evolved, numerous voices and perspectives have contributed to its current form. But its creator is far from precious about her project.
“A huge part of the joy of this is that it’s been incredibly collaborative. You’ve got these incredibly smart students saying let’s do that, or change this word. So part of it has been like a huge rewrite process, with everybody. And I love that, because I was a solo trapeze artist, which is great, but it’s also kind of lonely. So it’s wonderful that there’s interest in in, and that every student we’ve worked with has made it better. It’s like a dream come true.”
Barnum.Booth.Lincoln is at the Corpus Playroom from Wednesday 13th – Saturday 16th May.
