Theatre Projects

American Duet

This was a collaboration with Bill Feehely from Actor's Bridge. American Duet was my own story, about my growing up in Africa. It was about who gets to tell you what kind of music you do, or who you are. It was reflecting on civil rights. It was reflecting on things that were and are deeply important to me. Previewed in 1998 and premiered in 1999, this piece evolved into a cabaret-style presentation with the band members serving as narrators. Darius Rucker of Hootie & The Blowfish played the African American role with Hummon leading the band in an off-Broadway staged reading of the play. Later DUET was featured in the prestigious Eugene O'Neill Summer Workshop sessions.

Atlanta

I'd been wanting to do a Civil War piece for about seven years, but couldn't find a story. Adrian Pasdar is the actor, writer and director who is married to Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks. I was in Texas writing songs with them when he told me his idea of a Union guy killing a Rebel, finding love letters on the body and developing a relationship to those letters. I added other characters, a Southern colonel, slaves. We had a wonderful run of that play, Atlanta, in Nashville, and then in 2007, the show ran at the Geffen Theatre in Los Angeles for over three months, eight shows a week!

Francis of Guernica

Francis of Guernica is a lecture, a straight play and an opera rolled into one work. It focuses on the six weeks it took Pablo Picasso to paint Guernica. But it also deals with insanity, the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Fascism. On the last night of its initial run, officials from the Tennessee Performing Arts Center saw it. They realized the piece had a strong educational component and introduced Hummon to Humanities Outreach Tennessee (H.O.T.) and the Tennessee Repertory Theater, which chose Francis of Guernica for a full-scale production.

Piper

The death of my friend and band-mate in the Raphaels, Stuart Adamson, prompted the writing of The Piper Suicide and Celtic music became the center of that play. It's actually a straight-ahead play that happens to have 17 songs in it. I knew that the Hartford Conservatory did one new musical a year, so I applied, and I won. In April 2004 The Piper had a full production in Hartford, CT. Later I competed nationally and was chosen to be featured Off-Broadway in the annual NEW YORK NEW MUSICAL FESTIVAL, in 2006. A year later the Imagine Theatre in Manchester, UK, did a full work-shop production at The Lowry in Manchester. Conitnuing in it's development, the play had a full staged reading on the West End, and was optioned to Broadway Producer, Ricky Stevens.

Surrender Road

A story of a day in the life of a boxer. It's told with Shakespeare soliloquies, sung with piano and string quartet. It was picked up by Nashville Opera and was chosen as a featured new work at at Opera America's national conference in Detroit. A beautiful full production was mounted at The Ingam Center in 2006. The video of the show as well as a documentary shot about the making of SR is running regularily on the ARTS Channel.

Warrior