Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Little War, big show
Musical based on Brooks-Baxter War in Arkansas gets reading in Pine Bluff
It is spring 1874, and Arkansas is in turmoil. The Brooks-Baxter War is raging in Little Rock and other parts of the state. The conflict, between armed supporters of gubernatorial foes Joseph Brooks and Elisha Baxter, lasts about a month and leaves an estimated 200 dead.
It ends only after President Ulysses S. Grant asks United States Attorney General George H. Williams for a ruling on who should be the state’s legal governor. Williams’ opinion, issued May 15, names Baxter the governor. With no support from Washington, Brooks disbands his forces.
The end of the brief war also marked the end of Republican rule and Reconstruction in Arkansas, and the beginning of a power shift that stripped away many of the gains made by black citizens after the Civil War.
It is nearly 144 years later and a pair of folk musicians and a playwright are in the process of crafting a musical set against the backdrop of the Brooks-Baxter War.
Helaine and the Little War will get a public reading Saturday at the Arts & Science Center for Southeast Arkansas’ Bellamy Theater in Pine Bluff. Admission to the reading is free, though participants are requested to RSVP.
“It’s going to be an informal, participatory kind of thing,” says songwriter and former history teacher Charley Sandage.
He and fellow musician Charlie Crow, along with scriptwriter David J. Eshelman, are hoping to get feedback as they continue to craft their story of freed slave and inn owner Helaine Starkey, her daughter and the characters they encounter in 1874 Little Rock. “We want to get the reaction of the folks,” Sandage, 74, says from his home in Mountain View. “The plan is to have everyone onstage, and we want their input and their reactions.”
The story is germane to America’s current climate, he says, and explores race and other issues.
“The characters we have from 1874 are dealing with themes that could not be more relevant to right now,” he says.
. . .
The musical has its roots in the passion Crow and Sandage have for songwriting and Arkansas history. A song about the Brooks-Baxter War was first intended to be part of Sandage’s Arkansas Stories Project with the Mountain View trio Harmony.
“I’d gotten interested in the Brooks-Baxter War,” he says. “It was interesting to me that we had two individuals literally at war in the streets of Little Rock and in other parts of the state with their little ersatz militias.”
Sandage soon found that the story behind the war and its aftermath, with its political and cultural fallout, was too much to fit into one tune.
“It was like a dark, comic opera,” he says. “There was insanity on every street corner. It was the most bizarre set of events.”
Enter Crow, now 77, of Little Rock.
The pair had known each other since the early ’70s, when Crow was head of the Arkansas Department of Planning under Gov. Dale Bumpers and Sandage worked in the Parks and Recreation and Travel Division. Sandage was also part of the group that helped establish the Ozark Folk Center in Mountain View.
“I remembered him as a really talented songwriter and performer,” Crow says.
Fast-forward “a whole bunch of years” and Crow had moved back to Little Rock from Nashville, Tenn., where he had started songwriting, and reached out to Sandage to jam in Mountain View.
Through their shared interest in history, politics and folk songs, they started wrapping their minds around a way to tell the Brooks-Baxter War story.
“I’m like most people who grew up in Arkansas,” Crow says. “I’d heard of it, but I had no idea what the Brooks-Baxter War was about.”
The hook for Crow was Sandage’s assessment of the repercussions of the war.
“He said it was the first big chance that Arkansas had to make things right and they screwed it up. They blew it.”
At the end of Reconstruction, after federal troops pulled out of the state, Arkansas could have restructured its government to keep the reforms that were made, Crow says.
“A black middle class was beginning to emerge, and black professionals were coming into Arkansas,” he says. “There were some good things happening.”
When the old guard took over, though, many of those advances toward a more inclusive society were crushed.
“When the winds shifted, they did everything they could to turn back the clock and undo all the reforms they could,” Crow says.
. . . Sandage and Crow started working on songs and developing characters for what they were hoping would be a musical about this period, never mind that neither of them had ever worked in theater before.
Their story revolves around Helaine, a former slave who owns a Little Rock inn, and her 18-year-old daughter. The play occurs as the uncertainty of the state’s future weighs on the minds of the characters, who just happen to all be at the inn and include a black senator and his loose-cannon son; the son of Helaine’s former owner and his daughter; and a young white man from Northwest Arkansas.
“They’re all trying to deal with all these questions,” Sandage says. “It’s an odd set of circumstances.”
David J. Eshelman, a playwright and associate professor of communication and theater director at Arkansas Tech University at Russellville, wrote the script for Helaine and the Little War. He became involved after Sandage and Crow contacted Bob Ford, artistic director and co-founder of Theater Squared in Fayetteville, where the play was first read publicly in 2016 at the theater’s New Play Development Workshop.
When Ford couldn’t fit writing the play’s script into his schedule, he helped the two songwriters get in touch with Eshelman.
“Helaine is making the best life she can in Little Rock, but things aren’t as stable as she thought they might be, and she ends up having to be more political than she might have wanted,” says Eshelman, 40, a Buffalo. N.Y., native who, among his other duties, also teaches play writing at Arkansas Tech.
Gathering the raw material of the story and working it into a finished product is his job on this project.
“There are so many different places where you can start and finish, and so many different people’s stories you can tell,” he says. “After several drafts, we came to the agreement that Helaine is the more interesting character and it was her struggle we would make central.”
Sandage and Crow are theater novices, and have gotten a crash course in musicals and the effort it takes to put on a play.
“I knew nothing whatsoever about musicals, and neither did Charlie,” Sandage says. “I’m a songwriter and an amateur historian.”
“Musicals are just a lot more work,” Eshelman says. “And when you work with others, it’s important to take in everyone’s ideas.”
In a musical, he adds, the songs are the boss, so his job as a scriptwriter is to sometimes make way for the music.
“The important thing for a scriptwriter to know when working on a musical is that it is always about the songs. I may write a scene, but if they can do a song better than the scene, the song always wins.”
During the Fayetteville workshop, Sandage and Crow got a firsthand look at what they’d gotten themselves into, as their play, the only musical in that workshop, required much more staff and effort.
“Man, did Charlie and me get basic and advanced training in musical theater,” Sandage says. “It was intense.”
“It was two of the most intensive weeks I’ve ever spent,” Crow adds. “It was night and day. Charley and I felt like we’d gotten a master’s degree in play writing. They taught us so much, and we were anxious to learn.”
When a song needed work or a new song was needed or the script needed tweaking, they had to have everything done by noon the next day after working until almost midnight the night before during the two-week workshop.
“We were up at 5 a.m. writing,” Sandage says, laughing.
The public reading that came afterward was rewarding, he says.
“It was extremely well received. It was very gratifying. We sat down on the stage and talked with the audience for about 45 minutes and that was very instructive.”
Eshelman says the enthusiasm and curiosity the two songwriters bring to the production is inspiring.
“Their musical experience is phenomenal, their historical knowledge is amazing and they really have young minds when it comes to developing and learning about stuff.”
Crow can’t help but think of how the events of the 1870s in Arkansas are still pertinent today, and hopes an eventual production of the play will cause audiences to stop and think.
“We don’t want to preach, but when you look at the parallels between then and now, in terms of the impact of political shifts of power, you can see a pattern that’s starting all over again,” he says.
Sandage is determined to see the play produced, and looks forward to learning as much as possible from the audience and participants at Saturday’s reading.
“There is no going back on this,” he says. “This will see the light of day as a full-fledged production, or it won’t. But Charlie, David and I will stay with it until it is produced, or there is not a glimmer of possibility, however long that takes.”