About the show
What if the past isn’t past?
Shawn is a musician and spiritual seeker in modern Minneapolis, restless beneath the surface of ordinary life. When a group regression at his New Age church triggers a vivid connection to Balthazar — a rising religious leader in Neo-Babylonia — Shawn discovers that their souls are linked across twenty-six centuries.
As Shawn’s visions intensify, he watches Balthazar’s idealism curdle under the same ego that haunts Shawn’s own spiritual ambitions. Both men are charismatic. Both are self-deceiving. And both are on a collision course with forces that punish dreamers.
The show’s climactic question: if all incarnations happen simultaneously — if time is not an assembly line — can Shawn reach across the centuries and change a death that has already happened?
Escape From Babylon is a two-act musical that explores reincarnation, spiritual ego, the cost of transcendence, and the possibility that the past can be unmade by someone brave enough to face their own reflection in it. In the lineage of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Cloud Atlas, and Everything Everywhere All At Once.
What makes it tick
- Cross-timeline counterpoint — scenes and songs bleed across eras, with characters in 600 BCE and 21st-century Minneapolis singing in parallel
- A New Age milieu played for real — crystals, tarot, guided meditations, and a spiritual community that is simultaneously comic, sincere, and dangerous
- A love story in two registers — Balthazar and Anatu in ancient Babylon; Shawn and Sophia in modern Minneapolis, finding their way back to each other after years apart
- A genuine controlling idea: We can make new choices because the past is present
Songs
“There Is One” — a convergent musical service sung simultaneously by Shawn’s modern congregation and Balthazar’s ancient one. The show’s signature number and its native grammar: two men, two eras, one song.
More songs coming as they’re recorded.
Current status
Book in development. Twenty-plus songs spotted, with several fully scored and recorded. Dramaturgical input from Elise Dewsberry (NMI). The structure is a complete two-act arc; the book pass is underway.