The Last Flight: A powerful new musical by Sharon Jackson

BY MKUU AMANI

He has an important message to share, and yet Bishop Wright’s congregation has become hard-ears and rebellious. He needs support. And so, he employs Pastor Johnson.

With the Pastor’s help, perhaps the Bishop can turn things around. But a momentous event lies ahead, and the question is, can the pair do enough to prepare themselves and their congregation for what they’re about to experience?

The answer is revealed in Sharon Jackson’s thought-provoking new play The Last Flight.

Sharon Jackson is the writer and director at God’s Plays Ministries, a performing arts group based in the West Midlands. The group is staffed by volunteers who together deliver an evangelical community-outreach service. They perform plays and sketches about God and aim to raise awareness around key issues like health and crime

The Last Flight brings us the extraordinary occurrence of a worldwide explosion, the last day on Earth, and the story from the airport where we find that the last flight is almost set to depart.

Sharon spoke to Toronto Caribbean Newspaper about her new play and her other work in theatre.

“I wrote the play in 2011 while sitting in the New Testament Church, Walsall. It was written on a Sunday evening and performed the following Friday. That play lasted just twenty minutes, whereas this new version is a full-blown three-hour musical. It has more characters and includes more present-day issues. In the previous version, you couldn’t identify present-day issues other than somebody doing all the wrong things at the wrong time.”

 The musical will include songs by the playwright and two songs written by songwriter Sharon Blissett, whose husband Simon Blissett is also the Musical Director.

Over the years, as a singer/songwriter and playwright Ms Jackson has come a long way. Of the events that have influenced how her career in stage and drama has unfolded, perhaps none have been more invaluable than being chosen to play Rose in the play ‘Stepping Out’ in 2013, her first outing as a central character.

“It helped me,” she explained, “to understand about being backstage and stage presentation because although I’d written The Last Flight by then, it had no body to it. This experience gave me more scope for saying, this is how you deal with setting up auditions, organizing read-overs and getting the people with the right characters to fit the right parts.” 

In 2014 she successfully auditioned for the role of Rosa Parks, the African American civil-rights legend, arrested for refusing to move from her seat on an Alabama bus in Montgomery in 1955.

Rosa Parks: The Hidden Story, produced by Audrey Hayles-Parkes of Inspiring a New Generation, was written and performed to coincide with the 60th anniversary of Rosa Park’s arrest. The play provided an exciting opportunity for several first-time actors to work alongside established ones such as Lorna Laidlaw, known for playing receptionist Winifred Tembe in the BBC1 soap Doctors.

Reflecting on the experience Sharon recalled, “I was Rosa Parks for two years, and that was exciting. I was sitting in a chair for like, an hour and a half, portraying Rosa Parks, talking about when she was growing up, the things she saw, and about when she met her husband and her involvement with the NAACP.* It was good. Very, very good.” (*NAACP: National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People).

Fast forward to 2016 when Sharon wrote her second play Joy To The World, a romantic story of Mary and Joseph set in a time before the birth of Jesus Christ. Performed at the Nottingham Arts Centre, it examined, not just their journey, but the story of a young, gifted, humble, hard-working woman named Claude. It’s a play that offers hope and encouragement to the many unsung heroes that exist in society.

“Joy To The World is about everyone’s experience,” Sharon explained, “Everybody is Claude. You’ve got people being overlooked at work who could be as good as a line manager or CEO, but they don’t get that chance.”

Like other events, ‘The Last Flight’ has been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The original aim for the first performance of the new musical to be on November 7th, 2020, at the Bethel Convention Centre, Birmingham, is threatened. But this remains the aim.

The auditions that were scheduled for March 28^th will instead take place online. And despite the many challenges caused by the COVID-19 outbreak, Sharon feels very positive about her new play and her team.

“I have a good team that’s overseen by an Apostle. We have a prayer group and things in place that weren’t there before. With Joy To The World, I was very much at the heart of everything. This time we have an event planner/coordinator, a dance coordinator, and we have someone who can stand in for me if I’m not around. I’m happier and more relaxed. We have a lot of fun, and we gel together well.” she said before adding, “The important thing is that you put God first in everything.”

Find out more about God’s Plays Ministries.
You can also find them on YouTube.