Tituss Burgess and Azie Dungey share how they worked on the world premiere musical adaptation of a beloved ’90s film — and made some modern adjustments.
The line between miracles and magic can be as thin as a stage curtain rising from the floor. Just ask Tituss Burgess, the accomplished actor and singer, who gets to see his long-marinated musical adaptation of the beloved ’90s holiday movie, The Preacher’s Wife, make its world premiere on May 14 at the Alliance Theatre.
Burgess, who rose to fame (and garnered four Emmy nominations) as Titus Andromedon in the Tina Fey-created Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, worked for 15 years to successfully adapt the 1996 Denzel Washington/Whitney Houston vehicle for the stage.
It’s also a full-circle moment of sorts for the Athens native and University of Georgia alumnus, who remembers the giddiness he felt watching a production of the Debbie Allen musical, Soul Possessed, at the Alliance back in the early aughts.
“I can’t breathe a sigh of relief yet,” he says of the gathering excitement and nervousness ahead of opening night. “You guys still have to see it, and you still have to love it. But there is a sense of pausing and maybe loosening the belt.”
It’s Burgess’ first foray into this kind of behind-the-scenes command. He wrote the music and lyrics and served as a driving force every step of the way. And why this story in particular? He can still remember seeing the movie in theaters for the first time when he was in high school. He recalls how it was the first time he’d seen that kind of a multifaceted portrayal of Black characters’ lives on-screen.
Up until then, “I had never seen Black bodies have access to possibility beyond their current circumstance. They were always trying to undo a trauma. I never got to see them written whimsically,” he says. “Here were these middle and upper and lower middle-class Black bodies in the same sphere, taking care of each other, misunderstanding each other, trying to find each other.”
The plot of the ’90s film follows (you guessed it) a preacher, Henry Biggs (Courtney B. Vance), who’s having a crisis of faith, including some encroaching development pressure from a delightfully Scrooge-like Gregory Hines. That’s when divine intervention occurs: A bonafide angel named Dudley comes down from heaven to Earth, naturally in the form of ultra-charming, ultra-handsome Denzel, to help Henry correct course — then, he finds himself falling for Julia (Whitney Houston), Henry’s wife.
Although the film left a distinct impression on Burgess, it wasn’t until 2009 that he woke up one day feeling inspired enough by it to sit down at the piano and write three songs in a row, each of which is still in the show.
“I don’t make a move creatively unless I’m damn near hit by lightning — unless the heavens have parted and given me something to be fervent about and to chase,” he says. Lighting had certainly struck.
In 2016, with 90% of the music and lyrics already written, Burgess brought on Azie Dungey, whom he met on Kimmy Schmidt, where she was a writer, to construct the book of the show. The two formed a symbiotic partnership and brought the movie forward into present-day Harlem.
for the Alliance Theatre’s world premiere production of “The Preacher’s Wife.”
(Photos by Aniska Tong)
The DC-area-raised Dungey broke out in 2013 thanks to her scathingly funny viral web series Ask a Slave. Since then, she has worked on projects such as Girls5Eva and Harlem. But she didn’t just bring comedy chops to the table — she also had some real-life experience to draw from, like how her mother had married a man of the cloth, thus living the life, literally, of a preacher’s wife.
“Having observed my mother, I felt like I had some tools at least to kind of understand who Julia was,” she says. “When you’re the partner of someone in that position in a church, especially if you’re the woman, there’s a lot of requirements and expectations. [The church] continues to be a very patriarchal place.”
The narrative shifted under Dungey’s renewed vision in some key ways. For instance, Julia’s mutual attraction to Dudley and their romantic tension serve as a catalyst for Julia’s self-awareness, rather than as a learning tool for her husband’s growth.
After having worked on this project solo for so long, Burgess said he learned to trust Dungey’s suggestions for how to make the story stronger — which was an exercise in flexibility. Because the score had mostly been composed before Dungey came onboard, the two worked on rigorously reshaping the plot.
“I’m a terrible collaborator,” he says, laughing. “Most ideas come to me fully formed, and, gosh darn it, that’s the way it’s going to be. I think the word divine is so overused, but there’s something very beautiful that happened out of our collision.”
In general, the musical adaptation “digs a little deeper,” Dungey says, into what institutions of faith mean within the context of the 21st century. After all, the church can serve as a connector and healer but there are aspects of it “that need to change, the parts that wound,” she says. “We have to be honest.”
She adds that getting back to her theater roots to work on this script was a powerful reminder of what live performance can do and how it “almost creates more of a mysticism and a beauty in the same way the church does.”
“Theater has that sense of ritual, and we’re all experiencing this together in this building in a way that no one else has experienced right now. And people are taking us there with song and dance and catharsis and living and breathing all this life in front of us. And that’s very different from watching something on Netflix on your iPad.”
Burgess is still stunned that Broadway legend Loretta Devine signed on to play Marguerite, Julia’s mother, in this premiere. (She was also in the ’90s film, as Henry’s frazzled secretary.) He always had Devine in mind for the show and says he approached her nervously at an Emmys party about it many years ago.
“We flew her to New York, and she did the first reading, and, Lord, she fell in love with the material. But that’s kind of all that took,” he said. “That’s the thing — most often, all you’ve got to do is ask.”
Another yes came from director Michael Arden, who joined the project in 2018, when they did the first staged reading. Burgess and Arden go way back, having started as actors trying to hack it in New York in their 20s. “He was the only director to take me seriously,” Burgess says.
Arden won the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical last year for the Broadway revival of Parade. His co-captain on The Preacher’s Wife is Alliance Theatre Artistic Director Tinashe Kajese-Bolden.
Ahead of opening, Dungey says she’s ready to plant herself in the audience, listen to people laughing at her jokes and marvel at the music Burgess has brought into being.
“These songs are out of control,” she says. “They are already on another plane of existence, and these voices are absolutely stunning. Everyone’s going to pass out.”
Meanwhile, Burgess is still processing the victory. “There are so many emotions attached to just seeing it materialize on stage,” he says. “Every time I walk into the theater, there’s a new little wink from God.”
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Alexis Hauk has written and edited for numerous newspapers, alt-weeklies, trade publications and national magazines, including Time, The Atlantic, Mental Floss, Uproxx and Washingtonian. Having grown up in Decatur, Alexis returned to Atlanta in 2018 after a decade living in Boston, Washington, D.C., New York City and Los Angeles. By day, she works in health communications. By night, she enjoys covering the arts and being Batman.
