It Is Well With My Soul

It Is Well With My Soul is an original musical written by Gareth Hides and produced by Handiwork Productions. The show tells the story of hymn writer Philip Bliss, the blessings and temptations he knew and the events that lead to him writing the titular hymn. The show features seven professional actors, live music and backing tracks.

The show has toured theatres, churches and village halls. Handiwork brought Mark on board especially to provide equipment and expertise in making the shows in churches and halls achieve a comparable quality of technical production to the theatres. The main challenge is the variety of venues on a tour and budget and logistical constraints in taking all the set and equipment and setting it up and breaking it down every day.

Handiwork have some of their own equipment and we work together to provide a sound and lighting system that is flexible, compact and affordable but sufficient to deliver the scale and impact that a musical production needs. A musical about a renowned song writer and soloist obviously makes the sound quality key but the lighting also greatly influences the mood of the scenes and helps create a visual spectacle as well as carrying the story.

Theatre tech is about striving for perfection in setup and execution, the tech should be invisible and flawless. That places significant demands on the crew, everything has to be set up and packed down every day and there are a large number of lighting and sound cues in the show which must be checked and executed with care and precision.

One thing I brought to the show was the ability to pre-program many of the lighting and sound cues. Programming cues individually means more detail can go into each one. In the lighting, different fixtures can have different colours, positions and intensities varying the mood or emphasis. For sound, different songs and spoken parts can have different routing and reverb effects tailored to each part and section. Many of the improvements are small and incremental but put together make a much more professional and compelling show.

I love working in both music and theatre and I’m passionate about communicating the gospel creatively so it has been a huge privilege to combine those things and work with Handiwork on It Is Well With My Soul.