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SAN ANTONIO • San Antonians were treated to a one-woman preview of a new musical with local ties and its sights set on Broadway Aug. 12 at the University of The Incarnate Word. Native Saint: The Amazing Journey of Juan Diego has had an amazing journey itself, starting with its writer/composer, Luce Amen, who left San Antonio some years back and found success in a musical career based in New York City.
Armed with a beautifully expressive voice and surrounded on an otherwise bare stage by the instruments she would play in turn — electric and acoustic guitars, recorder, native flute and a serape-draped keyboard — Amen’s local performance brought to life the key characters in the centuries-old story of the humble Aztec peasant, Juan Diego, who encountered the Blessed Mother on the Hill of Tepeyac and found himself charged with carrying her message to Bishop Juan de Zumarraga that a church be built there in her honor.
Eighteen original musical selections in a variety of styles from mariachi to pop (all composed and performed by Amen) carried along the story in a 90-minute condensation of the full-book musical she has written and hopes to soon see produced.
Amen’s own story begins with her parents, Col. Henry J. “Hank” Amen, Jr., and Zelime Lytle Amen. “They really invested in the family,” said Amen, “creating a rich environment for us of faith and music and sports and scholarship.” All the children were given piano lessons as well as lessons in another instrument, Amen’s being the violin. |
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Born into an Air Force family, Amen’s early years were spent in Germany where she and her siblings were all placed in German schools to gain an appreciation of the culture. “Each of us was the only American in our class, so we learned (German) very quickly,” she noted.
When they returned to her mother’s native town of San Antonio, soaking up the Spanish language was easy for Amen, whose discography includes two albums of international favorites in several languages, as well as five albums of original songs. A graduate of St. Anthony Elementary School, Incarnate Word High School and the University of Texas at Austin, she went on to earn a master of arts in musicology at The Eastman School of Music in New York.
Amen’s musical interests were originally in the areas of rock, classical and jazz, but New York in the mid-’80s was undergoing a country music craze and she landed a solo gig at a little country music restaurant there called O’Lunney’s, eventually forming her own band to back her. They wound up entering and winning the Marlboro Country Music Contest as the best country band in the northeast, garnering the opportunity to open at Madison Square Garden in a concert featuring some of the biggest names of the day in country — George Strait, Alabama, The Judds and Randy Travis.
Since then, Amen has gone on to perform in a wide range of musical styles, here and abroad, in performances that have included appearing for U.S. presidents and British royalty. Not forgetting her San Antonio roots, she has also contributed original songs to two San Antonio compilation CDs, Music San Antonio and Viva Fiesta 2001.
It was a trip back to Texas 12 years ago that planted the seeds for Amen’s production of Native Saint. While checking how sales were doing on her albums at Tower Music in Austin
(fittingly located on Guadalupe Street), the employee she had been speaking with handed her a book on Our Lady of Guadalupe. “You should write about this,” he said. Already familiar with the basic story, once back in New York the little volume was placed on a shelf and soon forgotten in the midst of being a working musician, wife and mother of a young son.
Time went by until one day her little boy, just learning to walk, pulled a book — the one given her in Austin — from the shelf and Amen decided to read it. “And I felt very drawn to the story,” she said, describing its message as perseverance through faith in God and one’s self in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. “I felt the story was speaking to me,” she says.
She began reading other books on the subject and delved into research on it, even making several trips to Mexico City where she visited the basilica built on the site of the Our Lady of Guadalupe’s apparition to Juan Diego. “I just felt it was something I was supposed to pursue, so I pursued it,” she says, recalling the powerful feelings evoked by the story. She added, “I didn’t realize what a long journey it would be.”
Having pretty much given up on writing music at this point in her life, Amen found it “a nice revelation” that there was still more songwriting to be done. “And,” she says, “what a wonderful vehicle to do it through!”
The full-scale production in Native Saint’s future features a cast of around 20 characters, of which only the key figures were introduced in the one-woman show presented here. There are more songs as well, and additional scenes that include a little storyline set in modern times that will begin and end the show, wrapping around Juan Diego’s 16th century Mexico.
With all the elements for a large-scale musical being present, it was never intended to be a one-woman show and Amen’s vision for it involves plenty of dance and color. “I can see all the cultures coming together,” she says, describing the envisioned dream sequence in which Indian and Spanish cultures clash and then merge, as well the religious aspects of the Aztec gods versus Christianity.
“The dream is of the past, present and future,” she says, “so there’s room there for the Nahua speaking, the chants and the Nahua music and the Aztec music. And then there’s room for the Spanish dance of the future, the flamenco, which didn’t come around till later, and then Mexico — folklorico. It’s an incredibly colorful and dynamic combination.”
Starting with small presentations in her apartment in New York, and later ones here, as well as in San Diego, Dallas and Mexico City, Amen’s diminutive versions of Native Saint have all been well-received.
The Incarnate Word production came about as an opportunity for Amen’s 89-year-old uncle, Brother George Lytle, SM, a longtime missionary in Peru, to see the show while back in town for a visit. The performance itself was done as a benefit for a scholarship in her late mother’s name at UIW. (Zelime Lytle Amen Braun was a graduate of UIW, as well as of Incarnate Word High School.) Amen closed her local performance with a song written as a tribute to her mother, “Mary’s Song (Thorns Make the Roses Grow).”
“It’s the inspirational part of it that is so heartening,” said Amen of Native Saint, noting she has found it resonates with people of all faiths and, surprisingly, even those who have none. Her hope is that those who see it will draw courage from it if they are facing a challenge in their own life “and feel that it guides them to something that maybe they felt they couldn’t do.” |