Steal Away Is an Incredible True Story About to Be Brought to Life

Steal Away is the true story of Ella Sheppard and the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a choir of young former slaves. It is based closely on Andrew Ward’s heroic chronicle: Dark Midnight When I Rise. As they seek the right to an education, for the right of everyone to seek an education, they become targets of rabid KKK terrorism against all such schools. Although they and their school are physically attacked with bullets and bombs, the choir respond with powerful, deeply-moving songs of faith and freedom. Steal Away follows the choir’s impressively shocking rise from the inhuman depths of slavery to the ballrooms and throne rooms of Europe as they conquer the world. But they must also conquer their own personal demons. It has been said that Dark Midnight When I Rise is one of the most breathtaking and timeless true stories ever told.

Although not yet in production, Steal Away is still auditioning actors and crew, processing auditions, and raising funds and awareness of this awesome production. I will do my best to help. I am one of the thousands applying for a role in this production.

Here’s a video by Steven Blake, Steal Away’s producer: About the movie.

The character that I have applied for is Milo Cravath. Cravath’s parents were abolitionists and part of the Underground Railroad. The Underground Railroad was a network of people, African American as well as white, offering shelter and aid to enslaved people from the South. It developed as a convergence of several different clandestine efforts. The exact dates of its existence are not known, but it operated from the late 18th century to the Civil War, at which point its efforts continued to undermine the Confederacy in a less-secretive fashion.

Erastus Milo Cravath was a hawkish, militant civil rights crusader, the fearsome Director of the American Missionary Association. Cravath’s lifelong war against Southern supremacists and their armies of terror has shaped him into a merciless war hawk that some liken to Genghis Khan. But though a legendary enemy of racial oppression, Cravath’s hard-charging, take-no-prisoners crusade cruelly enslaves the African-American choir touring for his cause, making Cravath resemble the very enemy he’s fighting. Notoriously unsentimental, Cravath’s intensive eyes and moving backstory might tell a far deeper story.

Here are my auditions, somewhat hurried, one of which is unprofessionally self-recorded, but both are heartfelt:

Audition 1, Cravath defends himself (on TikTok)

Audition 2, Cravath goes off the rails, losing it. (also on TikTok)

I’d love to hear your reactions. I hope for a callback at some point, which will allow me to polish these rough performances and add different takes on this complicated character.

Reverend Erastus Milo Cravath was a pastor and American Missionary Association (AMA) official who after the American Civil War, helped found Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, and numerous other historically black colleges in Georgia and Tennessee for the education of freedmen. He also served as president of Fisk University for more than 20 years. (from Wikipedia).

Queen Victoria was so moved by the Jubilee Singers that she commissioned this portrait of them in 1874:

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