About This Show
This is a love story about Jim and Steve. Future Pontiff Jimmy describes his vivid childhood journey to Lourdes and Rome, followed by his disappointment that he didn’t hear “The Big Voice.” Then, a random act changes his life. At the age of 13, he sees a performance of Gypsy with Ethel Merman, meets her backstage and his life is changed forever. We learn about Steve’s life through songs. After Jimmy tells his story of almost meeting the Pope, Steve sings a song about almost meeting a famous evangelist. As Jimmy tells of being gay in a military boarding school, Steve sings of hiding in a redneck country high school.
The musical traces their meeting aboard a ship in the Atlantic Ocean, about their marriage, their interplay with Steve’s family, their struggle with disease, the writing of a hit musical, their personal separation, their rapprochement (“The divorce failed!”), and finally, the realization that people “affect the course of each other’s lives and never even know it,” illustrated by a dramatic moment in front of a religious picket line where a woman thanks them because something they wrote changed her life.
