It isn’t unusual to see people dancing the night away in Instagram posts from the house-music D.J. and producer Luke Solomon. So nothing looked out of the ordinary in a series of clips he shared in June, with partygoers boogieing to the bangers “Are There Any Queens in the House?” and “Sunday.”
Except, that is, for the songs’ provenance: They are from an upcoming concept album inspired by “Saturday Church,” a new Off Broadway production featuring music by Sia as well as Honey Dijon.
“So many of my friends were like, ‘We never imagined this is what you would be doing!’” Solomon — a music supervisor, orchestrator and arranger on the show — said, laughing, on a matcha break between rehearsals.
“Saturday Church,” which began previews Aug. 27 and is scheduled to open Sept. 15 at New York Theater Workshop, is based on the 2017 film of the same name. It focuses on Ulysses (Bryson Battle, from the latest season of “The Voice”), a Black teenager discovering his sexuality and who is alienated from his family. He finds acceptance at Saturday Church, a community program for at-risk L.G.B.T.Q. youths. But he yearns to stay involved in another church — the one that meets on Sundays.
In a way, the show’s team represents the multifaceted span of Ulysses’ world. Battle’s castmates include two Tony Award winners, Joaquina Kalukango (“Paradise Square”) and J. Harrison Ghee (“Some Like It Hot”). Solomon and Dijon’s résumés include songwriting and producing credits on Beyoncé’s “Renaissance” album — not the kind of bona fides you often see Off Broadway, let alone on it.
“I love a classic musical just as much as the last person, but it’s exciting to try to take a step in a new direction, too,” said Damon Cardasis, who directed the original movie and wrote its stage adaptation with the Pulitzer Prize winner James Ijames (“Fat Ham”). “Why can’t it feel like a night in a club with a beat and a rhythm, and be something you’d want to dance to?”
Like David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s “Here Lies Love,” one of the few musicals to fully embrace a club vibe, “Saturday Church” was hatched by people familiar with dance music, including Sia, who was a fan of the film.
Just don’t expect “Chandelier” or “Cheap Thrills.”
“I had so many uncut songs as I write a lot and often that when I heard they were turning it into a musical I was desperate to be involved and of service in some way,” Sia wrote in an email. “The trans community has my heart — I’m a devoted ally, and anything I can do to support the L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ community is always of interest to me.”
In addition to the unreleased songs, the music team reworked four tracks from Sia’s albums: “Sunday,” “House on Fire,” “Cellophane” and “I’m in Here.” Fans will also spot the overlooked gem “Blinded by Love,” which was performed by Natalie Portman on the “Vox Lux” soundtrack. (Cardasis and Ijames are credited with additional lyrics, Dijon with additional music.)
“The majority of the music in the show is music people have never heard,” Cardasis said. “Sia spent time going through what she thought thematically could work for the musical, and then it was a conversation back and forth, deciding which songs worked best, how to arrange them and how to also narratively help them tell this story.”
The self-described “gay son of a female priest,” Cardasis got the idea for his film at a real-life outreach program at St. Luke in the Fields Church, in Greenwich Village. In the movie, Ulysses ends up there after clashing with his stern, religious Aunt Rose (played onstage by Kalukango), who thinks she’s helping him by trying to suppress his queerness.
The show has less of an either/or position. Ulysses is happy to have found a support system with his new Village mothers (played by B Noel Thomas; Anania, host of the web interview show “Gaydar”; and Caleb Quezon), not to mention a potential love interest (Jackson Kanawha Perry). But he also wants to continue singing in the Sunday choir.
“This is a very tough, sensitive subject, especially in the Black community, because many people wish to live the life they want to live and still keep their connection to God,” said Whitney White, the musical’s director. “I thought that this story was needed because it’s a story of reconciliation: He’s seeking to integrate all sides of himself.”
That journey, simultaneously singular and universal, was one of the reasons Ijames was drawn to the story. “The film itself I thought was really remarkable,” he said in a video interview, “and I felt like there were some things that I could bring to it from my experience growing up queer in the church and trying to figure myself out.”
Ulysses wants to be able to partake in both the choir and the ballroom culture his chosen family introduces him to. And the two are not as antithetical as some might assume, starting with their roots. “So many of these spaces are built out of oppression,” Ijames pointed out. “The Black church is a response to not being included in the churches that existed at the time. I think ballroom comes out of that, things like Saturday Church come out of that: People make space for themselves.”
It was a natural move, then, for the show to build on the long association between the D.J. booth and the pew. “Those two vocabularies, house and gospel, they’re just born to be sort of sitting on top of each other,” Ijames said. “When you look back to disco, all those vocalists came from the church — Sylvester, Martha Wash, all of them have this gospel pedigree.”
One of the ways the production brings this forth is by having Solomon split titles and responsibilities with Jason Michael Webb, a composer and orchestrator who received a Special Tony Award for his arrangements on the play “Choir Boy,” and whose Broadway credits include “MJ” and “The Color Purple.”
Webb and Solomon had never met before being paired on “Saturday Church,” but they appear to relish their collaboration. “We have our unwritten manifesto between the two of us of our go-to records,” Solomon said. “Whether it be the spirit of Frankie Knuckles or the spirit of ‘Gypsy Woman’ or the spirit of New York, we have a common ground. A lot of it leans into the New York version of what dance music is, which is pretty broad.”
For Webb, connecting all those musical dots can only help expand audiences’ expectations. “There’s an entire genre or culture of music that is being invited in, especially the combination between house music and gospel music — real church gospel music,” he said. “One of the things that draws me to gospel music is that it carries a rich history of joy that comes out of struggle, and that, I think, is the heart of our story.”
It certainly helps close the circle that both gospel and house share with musical theater a penchant for ecstatic emotional releases — what else is an 11 o’clock number, after all? — and all three welcome the kind of powerhouse performers that Ijames affectionately calls “noisy singers.”
The show’s open-armed ethos echoes the one found in such recent productions as the revival of the gospel and R&B-infused “The Gospel at Colonus” in July and last summer’s “Cats: The Jellicle Ball,” in which a fairly faithful rendition of the Andrew Lloyd Webber score was deployed in a ballroom competition. “I think what we want to do is give people a new understanding of what theater could be,” Webb said.
It does not come as a huge surprise to see that the members of the “Saturday Church” creative team and cast contain multitudes. Four years before Battle joined John Legend’s team on “The Voice,” for example, he was a winner at the Jimmy Awards, which honor high school students in musical theater (his solo: “Heaven on Their Minds” from “Jesus Christ Superstar”). In addition to being an in-demand director, White is also a writer and musician who grew up enjoying the nightlife of Chicago, widely considered the birthplace of house. (“I love the club,” she said. “I’m going to be one of those grandmas in the club with a sparkly freaking beret.”)
White brought up ensemble member Primo Thee Ballerino, who slayed as Tumblebrutus in “The Jellicle Ball,” as an example of the backgrounds, training and sensibilities enriching the show.
“He has all this experience with worship but also is huge in the ball world,” White said. “And it’s like, ‘Can a dip kind of feel like praise dance?’ We are finding bridges between those spaces.” Whether it’s Saturday or Sunday, after all, the spirit can take many forms.
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