“For artists, art can kind of encompass everything about you; it’s not just the career you’re pursuing, but it’s what’s inside of you, and it becomes your identity.”
Melissa Mollner, Washington Heights
Producing a virtual cabaret show during the pandemic gave Melissa Mollner an opportunity to deliver a message of meaning and hope for people struggling in hard times.
I’ve done theater my whole life, basically since childhood. I grew up in Southern California, where I was involved in a community theater with my friend Dustin, who wrote two shows which both got produced there: Revelation: The Musical and Ecclesiastes: The Circus of Life. I had always thought the shows had potential outside of a faith-based audience, but I didn’t ever really think producing theater was a career option.
I moved to New York five years ago to work in online marketing. Six months into that job, I was offered a job with an Off-Broadway theater company and served as the Operations Manager for two years.
By early 2018, I felt like God was putting it on my heart to see Revelation produced in the city. I initially thought I was going to find somebody else with the experience and resources to produce it and started reaching out to connections, but then God began opening doors and it became clear that I would be the producer. I founded Level Ground Productions and Dustin moved to New York from LA to co-produce a cabaret of his show at Feinstein’s/54 Below with me that fall.
Around the same time, I was facing the difficult decision to leave my job with the theater company, despite not having another job on the horizon. The day after my last day in the office, Dustin and I met the owner of an Off-Broadway theater downtown. Although the theater had been booked solid for the foreseeable future, ten minutes prior to our meeting, he had received a last-minute cancellation, so he had a slot open and we had a show. In less than six months and with a lot of faith and elbow grease we ended up opening Revelation Off-Broadway in May of 2019.
After that, we were looking at what the future was for the show and for different opportunities in live theater. Come 2020, the weekend before lockdown, I’m at this big producers conference in the city. It draws the biggest players in the industry, and I’m meeting all these amazing contacts, and then — we go into lockdown. And I think, Okay, it’s just going to be a month or so, and then Broadway just starts to announce: closed, closed, closed. So my focus turned from potentially seeing Revelation produced in theaters again, to nothing.
While unemployed over the summer, Dustin, our friend Jonathan, and I started talking about one of Dustin’s other shows, Ecclesiastes: The Circus of Life. The book of Ecclesiastes has always spoken to me, but especially in recent years since moving to New York, a place where we are so driven by our careers. Themes like purpose, meaning, satisfaction — these are things that the artist community can be faced with in an industry full of uncertainty and that requires a lot of sacrifice to pursue. For artists, art can kind of encompass everything about you; it’s not just the career you’re pursuing, but it’s what’s inside of you, and it becomes your identity in a lot of ways. The pandemic has exponentially impacted artists in this city. It’s created a void for a lot of people who are now grappling with their purpose outside of a career centered around their artistic expression.
We decided to produce Ecclesiastes as an online cabaret, and I gave myself a two-week window to raise the money. God showed me a lot of provision during this time. Some really generous people who have been supportive of our projects jumped on and provided the funds, and we basically produced this show from inception to airing in about five weeks. Because so many artists were unemployed, we were able to bring together a really diverse group of incredible artists from the west coast to NYC, and they all went above and beyond to bring the show to life.
We had 500 people viewing the show when we first premiered it on YouTube, but the really cool thing is seeing how it’s continued to have a life after that. Now we have over 3,000 views in just two weeks. And we’re not marketing it, which means people are just finding it somehow, and you know, it probably got into a YouTube algorithm or something, but I really feel like it’s God bringing it to people.
What we hoped to leave people with were these questions: “What is your ultimate purpose on this earth? And if it’s not something bigger than your circumstances right now, will you feel like you are chasing the wind if the things that brought you meaning six or eight months ago are not here now?”
Ultimately, we don’t know if each person who saw our show left with this message, but the response we heard from people was so gratifying. There were some who commented things like, “Thank you for providing this quality entertainment.” But on another level, there were people saying, “This was so healing for me” and “This was restorative.” It wasn’t even just people who know and love the original text, but also those who have little or no familiarity with Ecclesiastes. And seeing how God was using this show to connect with people of faith and people not of faith made me think, Wow, Jesus is alive.
