Tower Topics ~ Summer 2001

Back to Table of Contents

Seminarians put Way of Cross to music

Steven Rogers thought he’d left the spotlight behind.

Rogers, a 44-year-old singer, dancer and choreographer, had performed professionally since age 8. But last year, a recent Catholic convert, he gave it all up to enter Conception Seminary College.

Steven Rogers directs his fellow seminarians

The song and dance man had decided to become a priest.

He was so intent on his new vocation that he kept his theatrical past secret from fellow seminarians.

“I’d said goodbye to the stage, I wanted to start a new life, but it keeps coming back,” said Rogers, whose resumé includes classical training in voice and dance, national and regional Broadway tours and a stint with Kansas City’s Westport Ballet.

Fittingly, it was during Lent, a time of renewal and reflection, that Rogers melded his past life with his new one. On March 17, before a standing-room-only audience, he directed his fellow seminarians and a handful of professionals in “Stations – the Musical,” a one-hour Broadway-style production based on the Stations of the Cross.

The cast of Stations.

Written 24 years ago by Paul Novosel and CSC alumnus Father Robert Murphy, Stations wasn’t new to Rogers. For six years he performed in a long-running regional tour of the show produced by “Theater at Vis,” a community theater troupe based at Kansas City’s Visitation parish. Rogers credits it with drawing him to the Catholic Church and ultimately to the seminary.

“Stations played a huge part in my vocation story; it brought me to a church and to a community,” said Rogers, who sees the ancient tradition of recreating the Stations of the Cross as giving symbolic meaning to the struggles of daily life.

Left, Bruce Ansems stars as Jesus. Right, Jesus is taken down from the cross.

“Past, present and future become one,” he said. “It’s played out each day in our lives, in our struggle to be like Christ. To me Stations shows me how I can die to myself and it’s done in a way that I understand, that I can grasp. It speaks to me.”

Rogers’ love for the musical and his passion for his newfound Catholic faith are so intertwined that when he first saw the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception during a retreat two years ago, all he could think about the entire weekend was performing Stations there.

“I thought it would be great to present it in such a prayerful, peaceful setting,” he recalled. “And now I’ve come full circle. I’m here at Conception and I get to share my love for the stage.”

Stations is traditionally staged in churches, primarily because it is more than just a musical.

The format is actually a prayer service, complete with a presider and responses from the audience.

“The people who come to Stations receive the spiritual blessings of the Stations of the Cross,” said Bruce Ansems, a seminarian of the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas who played Christ. “It’s not just something to watch, it’s something to enter into.”

Father Murphy and Novosel originally wrote Stations as a Lenten gift to their parish.

“We had no particular goal to farm it out,” Father Murphy said. “But as they say in the business, ‘It got legs.’ It’s just one of those things that seems to push the right buttons. I’ve had people come up to me with tears in their eyes after a performance to tell me how much it touched them.”

Much of the emotional wallop comes from contemporary characters that the writers added to the story. Over the years, they have changed the characters to reflect the times. Conception’s production included a homeless man, a high school student in prison for shooting his classmates and a burnt-out junior executive.

The “Patient,” a person who early in the show finds out he has a terminal disease, appears each time Jesus falls, and his suffering and dying parallel that of Jesus. Father Murphy created the character after attending a talk by Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, the noted physician who introduced the “five stages of dying.” As the show progresses, the Patient expresses denial, anger, bargaining with God, depression and finally acceptance. His death is portrayed in a humorous vaudeville number called “I’m a guest of God.”

Dan Bachner, a Joliet, Ill., seminarian and former professional actor who played the Patient, said he enjoyed the role because of its humor and because it enabled him, as well as the audience, to see the suffering of the cross more vividly.

“The music allows you to let go of preconceived notions,” he said. “And though there is a great deal of sorrow, it is balanced, as in life, by humor. When the patient dies, it’s a pretty funny scene.”

When Father Murphy and Paul Novosel wrote Stations, they hoped it would draw people to prayer and touch their hearts. And they hoped it would be entertaining.

Rogers said the long life the show has enjoyed and the looks on the faces of the people as they left the Basilica on the evening of March 17 are proof that they succeeded on all counts.

Rogers meanwhile has reconsidered his eagerness to put the lights and greasepaint behind him.

“All of this is so integral to what I do and what I bring to life here at the seminary,” he said. “I had a blast on the stage and it brought me to something greater than it. I wanted to give something and get something. I thought it would be fame, but instead it brought me a church and a vocation.”

Back to Table of Contents