John Kunich first heard of Marva Collins in 1975.
Kunich, a man from Chicago, Illinois, who would later join The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, learned through news reports about Collins — a Black woman from Jim Crow-era Alabama — and the school she ran from her home for inner-city Chicago children. After 14 years of working in a public school system that she felt didn’t serve minority children, Collins left her job to found the Westside Preparatory School.
Later, Kunich saw a 1979 “60 Minutes” news segment about Collins and a 1981 TV movie about her life. She taught challenging subjects like Shakespeare and Greek philosophy, despite the traditional school system declaring that her students were “unteachable,” recalled Kunich.
Continually impressed by her commitment to children’s education, he wondered if her story might make a good musical.
Kunich would spend the next 40-plus years writing the musical “Marva!” in stops and starts. Though large periods of time would sometimes pass between creative sessions — he didn’t seriously start writing song lyrics until 1996, for instance — he never totally forgot the project.
Now, decades after first hearing Marva Collins’ name, Kunich’s musical has a shot at going to Broadway. Kunich said “Marva!” is currently in the hands of two Broadway producers who are pursuing a deal with a Broadway director.
The journey from an idea to a full production has been long and unlikely — Kunich doesn’t even play any instruments.
But it’s a story entwined with his faith and with the ripple effect of blessings from his choice to join the Church.
“To see the hands of God in what has been created is a really humbling and inspiring phenomenon for me,” Kunich said.
Charlotte North Carolina South Stake President Bryan Jenkins, Kunich’s stake president, said that Kunich sharing his talents is bringing excitement and energy to local Church members.
“It shows that as we utilize the talents that the Lord has given us, that we can shine our lights to the world in big ways. … Whether it’s a big stage or a small stage, it’s all about reaching the one,” President Jenkins said.
Gospel seeds, unexpected blessings
Kunich was raised in Chicago as a member of another faith and joined the Air Force in 1979, he said. From there, the Air Force sent him to Harvard University for a law degree, and he spent 20 years working as a military attorney.
Throughout that time, Kunich said he began experimenting with songwriting, despite having no musical background. In this way, he learned that when he could simply write the songs, “the lyrics would imply music for me.”
Additionally, after joining the Air Force, Kunich met Church missionaries while attending a communications-electronics staff officer course in Mississippi. He was baptized in June 1980.
Not long after, Kunich saw the 1981 TV movie about Marva Collins, which planted the idea of a musical in his mind. He reached out to Collins while he was stationed at the now-decommissioned Chanute Air Force base in Rantoul, Illinois, and when she invited him to observe her in the classroom, Kunich took a day of leave and went to Chicago.
Watching Collins at work, Kunich said, left him “blown away.”
“She was just astounding, and how the kids just responded to her — she believed in them,” Kunich said. “She expected as much of them as she did from herself. They blossomed. They just did so well. These were kids that had been cast off by the Chicago public school system as ‘unteachable,’ and now under her care, they were doing fantastic work.”
It was the first of several visits to Collins’ classroom that made him think her life really would make a great musical, Kunich said. But his own life was still so busy, with the Air Force and Church service and his growing family, and he didn’t have much time for creative pursuits.
Years later, two experiences became the impetus for Kunich to get more serious about “Marva!” The first was during the early 1990s, while Kunich was having dinner with a married couple he’d helped convert to the gospel not long after his own baptism. These friends thought Kunich’s songwriting resembled that of Disney lyricist Howard Ashman and said they thought Kunich could write a musical.
Looking back now, Kunich considers the encouragement from these friends to be an unexpected blessing of sharing the gospel with them.
“Sometimes the seeds we plant bear fruit in a way we never, ever could have predicted,” he said. “It’s so improbable as to be almost impossible that it happened. And so that, I think, is really touching to me, that over all those years, [this musical] is a result of just speaking about the Church to people I knew.”
The second experience came in 1995, when “60 Minutes” followed up with Collins’ students from its 1979 news segment. Each former student was doing “wonderfully well,” Kunich said, and spoke how Collins had changed their lives forever.
With these experiences again bringing Collins to the forefront of his mind, Kunich began seriously writing songs in spring 1996. From there, he worked out each melody, recorded himself singing and sent those recordings to a musician who produced them with professional singers and instrumentalists. He also began writing the musical’s script.
By 1999, he was retired from the Air Force and working as a law professor, a position that Kunich said gave him much more time to pursue “Marva!” In the subsequent decades, he wrote and revised, wrote more and revised more, continually improving what eventually became 21 full-length songs and a complete script.
In the meantime, Kunich continued visiting Collins whenever he was in Chicago, keeping her updated on the musical’s progress.
“She thought it was great,” Kunich said. “It would be something that the kids would be proud of.”
Collins passed away in 2015. Kunich’s song “Why I Teach” was a favorite of Collins’, so much so that she requested it be played at her memorial service. Kunich said that Collins once told him that the song “perfectly summarizes” what her whole life was about.
“If that was all that I ever achieved from writing this [musical], that would be enough, because to hear her say that about my song, and how it exemplified everything she stood for, meant the world to me,” Kunich said.
Faith, hard work and self-reliance
Given his lack of theater connections, “Marva!” may not have gone any further than Kunich’s immediate circle. But a year and a half ago, Kunich said he met someone in the New York theater community. That person shared Kunich’s work with husband-wife Broadway producer team Jay and Cindy Gutterman, who are now working to close a deal with a Broadway director.
With a shot at Broadway on the table, Kunich hopes that a portion of proceeds from any productions of “Marva!” will go toward reopening Collins’ school, which closed in 2008 due to lack of funding. Kunich also wants to put some of the proceeds towards a nonprofit that would focus on teaching life skills to inner-city residents.
“If I can do that, then Marva’s effect, her contribution to future generations, will go on and on in a very meaningful, pragmatic way for people that will never have met her in person,” Kunich said.
The show itself will feature a predominantly Black cast, Kunich said, and a variety of music styles from rock to hip hop to soul. Woven through all of it will be themes of faith, hard work and self-reliance.
“These are principles that are definitely part of the gospel and part of the teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” Kunich said. “We want to teach people to fish, not just give them a fish, so they can feed themselves and their family forever.”
Kunich can also see how God guided him through the process of writing “Marva!”
“When I look back on it with a fresh perspective, it’s like somebody else wrote [these songs],” he said. “It’s very strange, but it’s better than what I could do on my own. It’s as if something was at play here that is beyond my capabilities.”
