Midnight Runs Late

A Watch Night & New Year's musical for young performers from The Holiday Series

It is New Year's Eve at Shiloh Grove Baptist Church, in a small Southern town where everything runs late, including the courthouse clock, which has run four minutes slow for thirty years. Eleven-year-old Micah has been brought to Watch Night instead of a countdown party and wants to know why anybody celebrates something new in the coldest, darkest part of the year. Over the two hours before midnight, Doc Whitfield, a retired HBCU biology professor, hands Micah the answer in pieces: the first Watch Night in 1862, the light that turned on the longest night, the frost that sweetens the greens, the seed asleep in a black-eyed pea. When the late clock strikes, Micah answers the question for the whole church.

Original story & music by Joseff McKenneth Goodwin:

• Keep Watch
• Wait Up For the Morning
• Too Dark to See It
• The Year Turns Over