A Note on the Journey
Some shows begin with a grand vision. This one began with a newspaper article and a Craigslist post.
In 2003, Aaron Kirk Douglas came across a piece about UFO believers gathering near Mt. Adams in Washington — ordinary, educated people who had nonetheless organized their lives around the conviction that extraterrestrial contact was not only real but imminent. Aaron wasn't a believer. But he was a writer, and something in the article stopped him cold. Not the UFOs. The people. The need underneath the belief.
So he did what any reasonable person would do: he posted an ad looking for a composer. The man who responded was Kurt Crowley, a Harvard-educated musician who had studied Music and Comparative Religion — which, in retrospect, made him almost cosmically qualified to score a show about alien-salvation believers. The two began building the piece from the ground up.
The first staged readings took place in 2010 at CoHo Theatre, directed by Bruce Akpan Hostetler. In January 2011, the show moved to Broadway Rose Theatre Company as part of the Fertile Ground Festival — two nights, a live audience, and the first real proof that something genuine was alive in the material. Then life intervened. Kurt found work on Broadway with Lin-Manuel Miranda and Hamilton, and the show went quiet for nearly a decade.
In 2025, Kurt graciously allowed Aaron to continue the show using what they had created. His music and lyrics from the earliest years remain woven into the score. What brought the show back to life was a collaboration with playwright Joel Cobbs, who undertook a substantial reimagining of the book — not a departure from the original, but a deepening of it. The show that emerged was gentler, stranger, and more honest. Less interested in the joke of it. More interested in the ache.
Everybody noticed it.”
The working title became Among the Stars. On August 23, 2026, at the Bridgetown Conservatory of Musical Theatre, the show takes the stage again in its fourth workshop — Kurt Crowley's music supplemented by new compositions from Joel Cobbs, music direction by Barney Stein, and Bruce Akpan Hostetler returning to direct. By a happy accident, the two weeks of evening rehearsals were held inside a rented church sanctuary: eight actors, a piano, and a director working under the rafters of a house of worship, on a musical about a small congregation of believers.
