Last November, Lexington, South Carolina's real roots band, The Restoration, released a record--Honor the Father.
The follow-up to April 2010's Constance--a concept album that explored racial indignities via mob violence in their hometown's early 20th century days--this record, too, had an over-arching narrative.
Back in Lexington, though in the 1950s this time, Honor the Father focuses the conceptual glare of lead songwriter Daniel Machado on a quasi-allegorical tale of Biblical radicalism and its concomitant abuse within the South's well-defined patriarchy.
And now, with the help of another Daniel (Classicalite's favored son Daniel Bumgardner, that is), that album is now a musical.
Re-made for the stage, Honor the Father: A Musical Thriller in One Act "examines the consequences of religious interpretation through two families in mid-20th century South Carolina: Diana Colly and Roman Bright, a couple united by mutual longing for spiritual enlightenment and escape from the modernizing world of the 1940s South; and Sheriff Glen Elewine, a closeted agnostic thrust into a high-profile murder investigation as his marriage comes to an end in the autumn of 1952."
Quoth the two Daniels, Machado and Bumgardner: "As the private details of Diana and and Roman's diverging literalistic interpretations of the Bible are put to the test after years of marriage, Sheriff Elewine struggles to make sense of disturbing evidence under the scrutiny of an outraged public."
"Hungry for justice," the duo claims, "thousands clamor for a speedy trial against a silent suspect accused of witchcraft and murder."
Eat your heart out, Flannery O'Connor.
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