The Golden Door is a rich tapestry of song and dance celebrating the cultural diversity of our country. The creative team collaborated with immigrants and people of color to help tell a visually and musically beautiful story of our national identity while also exploring the persistent tensions in what it means to be American. The story of the creation of this piece mirrors the story of the piece itself. In a time of deep cultural divide, it is a much-needed reminder of the power of human connection and how we can never understand each other if we don’t get to know each another. Equal parts soulful ballads of love and loss balanced with high-spirited tributes and rock-n-roll anthems, the audience is promised to be swept away on a dynamic journey as complex as the country we call home.

The Golden Door follows a diverse group of young immigrants facing the joys and hardships of leaving their homelands and making a courageous journey to a new home in America. Though there are some featured characters, it is not one person’s story. It is an ensemble piece about the collective experience and the power of human connection across what we perceive to divide us. It begins as we meet a contemporary American teenager who has been injured as a consequence of bullying due to her immigrant father. Her friend gives her a diary that she thinks might help with her healing journey. The despondent teenager begins reading the diary, and we are transported back in time to 1903 to the deck of a ship where a naive and over-protected young French woman, Marie-Louise LeDuc, is writing about her journey to America. The ensemble of diverse immigrant passengers, coming from a colorful tapestry of cultures, sing about their hopes of a better future in America. Marie-Louise, on the other hand, is highly ambivalent about leaving her home in Paris. She meets Jeremiah Brown, an intellectual Black man who works on the ship to earn money to pursue his dream of becoming a writer. He shares Marie-Louise’s jaded view, but for much more legitimate reasons. She also befriends Patrick, a cheerful Irishman starting a new life as a farmer; Yael, a Jewish girl fleeing anti-Semitic violence with her parents; and Giuseppe, a young Italian man traveling with his family to pursue his father’s American dream as a scientist. Jeremiah tells a different story of ancestors who crossed this same ocean on a boat “but not one of hopes and dreams like this one.” As their stories unfold in colorful musical scenes, the new friends deepen their understanding of and affection for each other.

In Act II, The Golden Door enters into the tension between the high ideals on which America rests and its imperfect history in realizing those ideals. Marie-Louise, Jeremiah, and their companions on the journey issue a challenge to live up to the demands of justice and not yield to fear. In the final scene, the action moves to the contemporary era, and the full cast appears in contemporary dress as the descendants of those on board the ship. They sing a medley that concludes in a grand finale, “Home,” in which the ensemble asks the nation to stay true to its promises of equality and liberty.

The work was born from the artistic team’s desire to build a narrative that explores the persistent tensions in our national story. We are a nation born of ideas and ideals, and yet America cannot be neatly captured in the “melting pot” metaphor so often used to describe it. The work explores how dreams lift us one person at a time, and how cruelties wound us one person at a time. Ultimately, our vision stands on the side of hope, and as Jeremiah tells Marie-Louise, “Great dreams are worth great courage.”

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The Golden Door takes place on the deck of a passenger ship on it’s way to Ellis Island in the year 1903. The cast consists of five principal characters of varying nationalities, all of whom are initially strangers to each other. The work considers how the historical dynamics of the period impact individuals, and the deck of the ship acts as a microcosm for the possibilities and opportunities, and for the equally real challenges born of a multicultural society.

The period of 1880-1920 saw a tremendous surge in immigration to the United States, with large populations coming from Germany, Ireland, Great Britain, Russia, and Eastern Europe. Many came seeking jobs in industry or to make a living in agriculture. Many left because of political conditions, such as the Eastern Europeans living under foreign imperial governments, and some fled outright oppression, such as the over two million Jews who came to the U.S. during this time. The period is surely one of the most significant in American history, helping to define its growth in industry and its expanding breadth of ethnicities that form its population. However, the period is not necessarily captured neatly in the “melting pot” metaphor so often used to characterize it.

The Golden Door considers: the uncertainties faced by immigrants; the changing American attitudes toward immigration itself, which remains a relevant social topic to this day; and the inherent challenges of a multi-ethnic society in which ideas of “we” and “they” are ever in flux.

Michelle Van Doeren conceived The Golden Door at the intersection of two professional careers, one as a performing artist and another as an educator. Her vision has been at the heart of this project: the notion that performing and narrative arts have a special promise for conveying the essence of cultural intersections in a way that can create an exceptional work of art, cultivate community conversation, and provide a touchstone for educational opportunities. Around this original vision a creative team coalesced: Van Doeren as author, director and choreographer; Scott Anderson as composer; and Andrew Swensen as producer, co-author of the book, and lyricist.

Thanks to a grant from an anonymous donor, development of The Golden Door began in a workshop held in cooperation with the Conservatory of Performing Arts at Point Park University in 2016-17. Additional fundraising provided the resources to conduct a second workshop in New York City in April 2018. In June 2021, we were selected to be presented at the Florida Festival of New Musicals in Winterpark, FL where the work received enthusiastic reviews from audience and producers alike. Since that time we have been working to refine all the elements needed to fully stage the work — recording new demo tracks, revising the script and score, and building our community of support. Please travel around the site to learn more about what we have achieved already and about what lies ahead!