photo by: Mike Yoder

The cast of "The Ballad of Black Jack" performs the song "Kansas" during a recent rehearsal for the musical, which opens at Theatre Lawrence on Friday, Sept. 10, 2021.

“The Ballad of Black Jack,” a homegrown musical about Bleeding Kansas, has been around for about half a century, but it’s hardly a static relic from another era.

If you saw it at Baker University in the 1970s, as many schoolchildren on field trips did, and then in some later decade, something likely was quite different about the second show: a new song, a new character or two, an extended — or vastly abbreviated — running time.

It always had the same theme — the epic confrontation between pro- and anti-slavery forces, featuring the legendary John Brown — but it lent itself to plentiful variations, which its creator, the late Baldwin City composer and playwright Don Mueller, seemed to embrace.

“I knew Don back in the day,” says Laurie VanderPol, who is directing a freshly edited version of the show as the season opener for Theatre Lawrence. By “back in the day,” she means when Mueller’s musical was an annual staple at Baldwin City’s Maple Leaf Festival.

Mueller played his own score on the piano and would tack on different flourishes throughout the years. There’s a running joke, VanderPol says, that new characters would also frequently be added because Mueller would run into someone at the grocery store and say, “Hey, do you want to be in this year’s show?”

At one point, the show’s running time had good-naturedly ballooned to three and a half hours, VanderPol said. Theatre Lawrence’s production, which opens Friday, has been dramatically scaled back to an essential “but entertaining” 95 minutes.

“Modern audiences don’t like three hours,” she says, but she’s confident they’ll like the core drama in the show, which depicts the 1856 Battle of Black Jack — a real Douglas County conflict that some historians consider to have been the actual start of the Civil War.

photo by: Mike Yoder

Jim Tuchscherer, of Topeka, portrays John Brown in the musical “The Ballad of Black Jack,” which opens at Theatre Lawrence on Friday, Sept. 10, 2021.

“John Brown (played by Jim Tuchscherer) is really prevalent in the second act when he comes to Lawrence to save the day,” she says, and there’s always that tension with Brown, an abolitionist who notoriously considered himself “an instrument of God” and who embraced violence in furtherance of his cause: “Is he a crazy man?” VanderPol asks. “Is he a hero or crazy man or both, you know?”

VanderPol credits the show’s choreographer, Robbie Fowler, and its music director, Susan Hash-Hires, for the crisp feel of the new production.

“There’s some real nitty-gritty, wonderful dancing in the show,” she says. “It’s just surprising to me every night (during rehearsal).”

She gives special props to piano accompanist Megan Widger, who reconciled and reduced the musical score from previous production notes.

“It’s in much better form than it has been for years,” VanderPol says. “Don played it himself, so he would just make up and add notes where he wanted. And now it’s like really together so that another company could (easily) perform it.”

photo by: Mike Yoder

The cast of “The Ballad of Black Jack” sings “Who’s gonna vote” during a recent rehearsal for the musical, which opens at Theatre Lawrence on Friday, Sept. 10, 2021.

Something else VanderPol touts about the show is the historic importance of the events depicted and the connection to Douglas County. The Black Jack Battlefield, a National Historic Landmark since 2012, is only about 25 miles southeast of Lawrence.

“You can go there,” she says. “It’s so important to American history” and “the battle about discrimination.”

Another reason the battlefield is special, especially to theater folks, is that it’s the final resting place of Mueller, the theater man who made a life’s work out of keeping the historic battle alive. Mueller died in 2013, and his ashes were scattered at the site by friends and former cast members.

For additional information about Theatre Lawrence’s “The Ballad of Black Jack” 
or to purchase tickets, visit theatrelawrence.com. Patrons must show proof of vaccination against COVID-19 to enter the premises at 4660 Bauer Farm Drive.

photo by: Contributed

“Encountering John Brown” opened Saturday, Sept. 4, at Watkins Museum of History and runs through Nov. 6, 2021.

Theatre Lawrence’s production of “The Ballad of Black Jack” has a companion exhibit at the Watkins Museum of History. “Encountering John Brown” opened Saturday at Watkins, 1047 Massachusetts St., and will run through Nov. 6. It tells the story of John Brown’s involvement in the pre-Civil War anti-slavery movement and the violent clashes in the mid-1850s, through the eyes of key historical figures he met, such as Frederick Douglass, Robert E. Lee and Harriet Tubman. The museum will also provide an additional exhibit in the Theatre Lawrence lobby during the musical’s run.