I needed to find another half. And, boy, did I find a doozy. If you want to curl up with a good read some chilly night, try a book called The Provoked Wife, by Mary Nash. It tells the almost unbelievable story of Susannah Cibber, the woman who sang the mezzo-soprano role at the Dublin and London premieres of Messiah. In those pages I found the basis for the other half of my play.
Theatre is collaborative.
A script isn't a play, any more than a musical score is music. My great good fortune was finding people of immense talents who became interested in the same story I was. Under the direction of Bob Nelson, Chair of the Department of Theatre and Media Arts at BYU, the play was first read publicly in the Margetts Theatre on the Brigham Young University Campus. The School of Music recorded the Handel scores the play requires, and that music has been used in every production since. Another who responded was a man the Mormon artistic community should know better than it does, Varlo Davenport.