THE GREAT ONE is an original one act musical, set in "The Slick" a past-its-prime hockey bar in EDMONTON, Alberta, Canada, on the day after "The Great One" Wayne Gretzky was traded from the hometown Oilers to the Los Angeles Kings.

"The Trade", as it came to be known, shocked Edmonton and the Hockey world to the core. A front page story throughout Canada, the United States and much of the rest of the world, the transaction that sent Wayne Gretzky to Los Angeles is the single most important trade in the history of the NHL, and arguably the most significant in the history of professional sports. Gretzky, unquestionably the greatest player in the history of hockey, still owns most of the offensive records in the league and many of those records stand little to no chance of ever being broken. More importantly, Gretzky and his Oiler teams were vital components to the identity of not only Edmonton, but Canada itself. 

After being approached by Short North Stage concerning their interest in staging something related to hockey in order to take part in NHL All Star Game weekend, hosted by the hometown Columbus Blue Jackets at Nationwide Arena (a very important event for the team, the city and the greater Columbus community), I created the spine of a story focusing on a group of hockey fans on the day after the most significant moment in the modern history of the sport, and fleshed out the book of our musical with my writing partner JJ Tiemeyer. Once the framework of our story was in place, Canadian born composer James Higgins set to work creating the musical numbers. The first draft of book and score were completed in three months. Since then, we have been expanding and refining the story through a series of extensive rewrites. The show is still very much a work in progress, and we expect to make changes all the way to opening night.

Once we chose to focus on the fans, it seemed only natural to explore the immediate aftermath of "The Trade" in Edmonton, the community to which it mattered most. The day after the trade was announced presented us with the ideal place to begin our story, at the moment when the emotions and anxieties of the fans were at their zenith. Fans are pretty much the same throughout time, from the age of the gladiators to the age of ESPN. Much of their opinion of themselves and their community is invested in the fortunes of the team. For instance, look at the way Columbus embraced the hometown Blue Jackets during their recent NHL success. The city was alive with energy generated by the sense of community only a sports team can create. This is a global phenomenon. Sports are universal. Sports unite. Sports divide. Sports lift spirits. Sports crush hopes. Sports greatly contribute to a feeling of shared identity amongst its fans and beyond. This reality is timeless and eternally true.

 

Program notes by Scott Hunt