By Foreman Heard
It has been fifty years since the youth group the Fellowship Players of the First United Methodist Church of Sanford, Florida, staged a production of the Broadway musical, Godspell, in the youth building of the church. Playing to four sold out audiences in August of 1975, the cast of ten actors and an equal number of stage and house crew presented lively, funny, and moving performances.
Jean Patteson, then the Women’s Editor of the Sanford Evening Herald proclaimed it “a show which appeals to all the senses, and to all ages. Its message is joy and can be shared by all.”
Following the 1975 performance, the cast and crew were in a downcast mood thinking that the thrill of the show was over and that it would never happen again. But joy and surprise soon came when the directors decided to do a revival of the show the following summer going so far as to schedule out of-town performances, including a road trip to locations in Georgia and Northern Florida.
The five day tour included shows in Jacksonville, Tallahassee and Macon, Georgia. At back to back performances at the Callaway Gardens Resort in Pine Mountain, Georgia, some anxious attendees stood in line for four hours just to be able to claim a seat. Upon returning home, additional travel locations took the group over the Central Florida area from Clearwater to Titusville, finishing with a final standing room only performance at the Jaycee Center in Orlando.
The summers of 1975 and 1976 presented challenging and unique opportunities for the mostly teenage cast and provided lessons learned about teamwork, responsibility, and dedication to a cause. Many of the group have remained in contact with one another over the years, and in 2011, gathered in Sanford for a reunion with all but one cast member who could not attend, and the notable absence of three who had passed away.
A Saturday night vocal performance was held at the First United Methodist Church with almost two hundred in attendance. The performance included most of the Godspell songs, as well as brief testimonies by members of the cast of expressing what the Godspell experience had meant to them. It was a memorable evening.
In July of 2025, two cast members, Foreman Heard of Sanford, and Jolene Brubaker Baxter of Ijamsville, Maryland, collaborated over the internet for six months piecing together into a book of anecdotes, stories, memories and pictures of the two year Godspell experiences. Details include original scene design sketches, descriptions of performances, thoughts on auditions, replacing three cast members, riding on a non-air conditioned rented school bus in the heat of summer, and dozens of rehearsal and performance pictures.
Titled The Godspell Truth, the book became available for purchase in December from the publisher, LULU.com for $20 and is available currently only online from Lulu.com. Later this year, it will be available from Amazon and other distributors.
