Vartabedian ’78 has written the book and lyrics for two musicals,
Mother Divine: The Musical and American Story.
At an evening event on July 18 at the Benton Club in St. Joseph, Mo., Laurel Klinger Vartabedian ’78 was honored with one of the Mayor’s Awards for the Arts.
The awards, explained Mayor Bill Falkner, “encourage citizens to express themselves in areas that create culture and opportunities to experience an event, whether by participating or enjoying a relaxing evening being entertained.”
No wonder then that Vartabedian – a WSU communications grad and former LAS faculty member who now makes her home in St. Joseph with her husband and Missouri Western State University’s president, Bob Vartabedian ’80 – was named Artist of
the Year.
Also in July, one of her collaborative creations, Mother Divine: The Musical, for which she wrote the book and lyrics, opened at NYC’s Pearl Theatre on 42nd Street as an official selection of the New York Musical Theatre Festival’s 2013 Next Link Project.
Mother Divine is based on the real-life exploits of Depression-era Harlem evangelist Father Divine, and takes a comic look at him and his first and second wives, his two “Mother Divines.”
Father Divine’s doctrine featured immortality and celibacy, spiced up with the finer things in life, including a custom Deusenberg called “The Throne Car.”
His mission hit a bump in the road when his presumed-to-be-immortal wife, Mother Divine, died. Not to be detoured, he “reincarnated” her as a bombshell known as “Mother in the Second Body,” since, according to Father, Mother desired a body more fitting of her righteous spirit.
“Interestingly,” Vartabedian says, “the spark for the show came from a Quarterly Journal of Speech article about Father Divine and the fact that I’d just directed Ain’t Misbehavin’ as the sponsor for an on-campus organization at Western Carolina. I do like the ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ aspect of the show!”
What a ride Mother Divine offers, full of twists and turns, and a blues and gospel-tinged score evocative of 1930s-style music. Vartabedian and Bill Evans, who composed the music, also collaborated on American Story, about the conflict between coal miners and the Rockefellers that came to a head in the Ludlow, Colo., strike and subsequent massacre of 1914.
