It’s the Christmas season. You settle into your seat and stare at a stage that doesn’t say much about Christmas. There’s no Bethlehem backdrop, no rustic stable, no twinkling stars. The lights dim, and … boom! Your senses are roused with an amped-up, rockin’ telling of the Christmas story.
You’re not at Big Box Baptist Church; you’re at a downtown theater experiencing “He Rules the World,” a two-hour “rock concert” that’s every bit Christmas and yet nothing like any Christmas show you’ve experienced at any church or concert venue.
Jennifer and Peter Emerson
“He Rules the World” is the creation of Peter Emerson, an accomplished singer, musician and composer who has put a fresh musical spin on the Christmas story while staying true to the Gospel narratives and drawing from familiar hymns. The show has been audience-tested and will open for its first holiday run Dec. 11-14 at the historic Hippodrome Theatre in downtown Waco, Texas .
Emerson said the seeds of “He Rules the World” were planted in late 2018 when he took his daughter to see the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, which for 25 years has been touring the United States with its high-energy “Christmas” concert. Emerson said the show had lights, lasers, LED screens, smoke effects, pyrotechnics — “everything you can want.” Almost.
“It was really enjoyable, and while I’m there, I’m just noticing it is a completely secular show. It is Christmas-adjacent,” he said. “I had the feeling I could do a lot of the things they were doing, obviously in my own way instead of their way, but I had a skill set that I could do something like that. And it really spoke to me that wouldn’t it be nice to ‘put the Christ back in Christmas,’ to use the cliché. And that’s what I set out to do.”
Emerson brought plenty of musical chops to the process. His resume includes a bachelor’s degree in music composition from Baylor University, a conservatory diploma in jazz composition from Berklee College of Music, and a master’s degree in jazz studies from the University of North Texas. He also served as a pianist in the United States Marine Band and is a Gulf War veteran, and he’s been a long-time music and jazz educator in Texas including 16 years at Harker Heights High School in Central Texas.
Emerson wrote the bulk of the show over a six-month span in 2019, and then he and his wife, Jennifer, an attorney who is executive producer, presented a “proof of concept” show in 2022 at the Dell Performing Arts Center in Austin.
“Then we took 2023 off to kind of think about, well, what do we have and what do we want to do with it? And is it something we want to move forward with and how much do we want to invest in it? And just how willing are we to put ourselves out there?” he said.
Those questions were answered with a full staging of the show in July 2024 at the Waco Hippodrome and now a return to that venue in December. While the Emersons live in Austin, they have plenty of connections in Waco, including his being on the music staff at First Baptist Church.
“It’s kind of a hometown for me in a lot of ways,” he said. “I’ve got family there. My mom is still in Waco. My church family is in Waco. We knew we would get a good amount of support in doing this in Waco.”
Biblical foundation
“He Rules the World” incorporates 17 songs that, with the exception of the first one, “Just What is Christmas?,” tell the Christmas story as presented in the Gospels.
“We are exploring what it says in the Scriptures and trying to think about it from the perspective of the participants, from the real human story Mary and Joseph would have been going through,” Emerson said.
He added that the show doesn’t provide any new information about the Christmas story but strives to tell a story overlooked in the 21st century.
“What we’re trying to do is put the focus back on the main issue at hand, which is that we celebrate Christmas because it’s the birth of Christ. And that’s the single most important event in history that happened prior to the crucifixion and Jesus rolling away the stone and having the empty grave.”
Jennifer Emerson said while the story is familiar to those who know the Bible, there may be some “renewed perspective.” She points to “Angels, from the Realms of Glory,” sung from the perspective of Mary, who usually is depicted as overjoyed to be the mother of Jesus.
“What we’re trying to do is put the focus back on the main issue at hand.”
“But then you hear the song and you think about what would it have been like to be a 15-year-old girl who gets the news out of nowhere that, ‘You’re going to be pregnant soon, and it’s with God’s child, and you’re going to raise this child, and you’re going to have to tell the man you’re engaged to about this.’ And what would that have felt like as a human being?”
Similarly, there’s “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” a conversation between the angel and Joseph, and “The Innkeeper – Away in a Manger,” sung by the innkeeper who takes in Joseph and Mary.
“They’re knocking on doors all over, and they come to this one last door, and the innkeeper says: ‘I’m so sorry, I don’t have any room here, but I’ve got one spot you can use, my manger, my stable,’” Jennifer said. “And it’s sung from the perspective of the innkeeper feeling like there’s something really special about what’s happening. ‘What is different about this couple? Why do I feel like there’s something momentous happening here?’”
She said these perspectives are not necessarily new, but they highlight the human side of the story.
“This wasn’t people who didn’t have doubts. These weren’t people who never faltered. These were people just like us. They were real people, and that’s one of the things that’s so interesting,” she said.
Peter Emerson concurs. “What we do with it doesn’t challenge the Scripture in any way. It affirms the humanness of the people who participated in it.”
The songs are tied together with video animation and narration by actor Kevin Sorbo, perhaps best known for the “Hercules” television movies and series of the 1990s. Sorbo also is an executive producer.
Rockin’ the story
While the official show website calls it a “rock concert,” at least one interviewer has called it a “rock opera,” and Emerson doesn’t argue against that.
“It could be,” he said. “We have struggled with identifying exactly what it is that we have. It’s a concert telling of the Nativity story. It uses rock music, uses some R&B, and it uses some jazz influence, and it uses just my style of music, and I don’t have a label for that. But yes, you could call it a rock opera in the sense that it’s not staged. It’s five singers on stage singing from various perspectives.”
The music itself spans the full range of rock styles, from ballads to power anthems. Each song except the first one uses at least one familiar Christmas melody as a connecting point. Sometimes there are pieces of the original text, but Emerson has intermingled new lyrics to help tell the story from the characters’ perspectives, whether it’s Mary, Joseph, the Innkeeper, Gabriel, the Wise Men or Herod. Some of that approach came from the way the Trans-Siberian Orchestra takes a familiar melody like “Carol of the Bells” and makes it their own.
“Almost everybody who comes to see the show can hum along with a part of the show instantly.”
“One of the things I liked about what they were doing is there was familiarity,” he said. “This is a brand-new show in a brand-new way, but almost everybody who comes to see the show can hum along with a part of the show instantly, even if it’s just subconsciously.”
As for the lineup of songs, Emerson said he turned in a hymnal to the Christmas section and started looking at hymns he grew up with in church and always has loved.
“Before I was old enough to understand the message (of the hymns), I loved the writing and the melody and the line and the shape and the harmony,” he explained. “And so what I tried to do is take the shape of the melody and reuse that, reharmonize around that and launch into new material.”
Emerson said he sees those Christmas hymns as “stained-glass windows” with each one telling a piece of the Christmas story.
“I took those stained-glass windows, if you will, and chronologically kind of put them together. And I actually use those Christmas melodies in order to tell the story. And then I wrote additional material around it and adapted lyrics to be sung first-person so we could actually tell the story from the perspective of Mary, Joseph, Gabriel, Herod, the Wise Men.”
Emerson’s compositions draw from his broad mix of musical tastes, including rock and roll, jazz, progressive rock, and classical music. Listeners may hear some hints of Alan Parsons and Yes in “Bring a Torch Jeanette Isabella,” while “Angels We Have Heard on High” kicks off with the unmistakable opening riff from “Proud Mary” by Creedence Clearwater Revival.
A self-described “recovering music snob,” Emerson said he grew up listening to bands like Styx, Rush, Kansas and Toto, but later gained an appreciation for The Beatles, the “great American Song Book” compositions of Cole Porter and the Gershwins, as well as jazz through the vocals of Mel Torme and Ella Fitzgerald and the instrumentals of Bill Evans and Thelonius Monk.
“When I was at North Texas, I played piano in the Four O’Clock Lab Band and I sang lead tenor and arranged for the North Texas Jazz Singers — that really tight Manhattan Transfer type of vocal arrangements,” he said. “And I was studying Gene Puerling arrangements for the Hi-Los from the 1950s and just really fell in love with that real tight vocal harmony, and I’ve put some of that challenging stuff in the show.”
While Emerson is the lead vocalist on the first tune, he said the true “featured singer” of the show is David Gaschen, who has performed as the phantom in “Phantom of the Opera” on Broadway, and who runs a voice studio in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. Emerson said Gaschen, who also is a co-producer for the show, had been looking for a way to get back on stage and joined the production. He, in turn, helped locate some of the other voice talent, including former students.
The instrumentalists include Emerson, who plays keyboard, piano and keytar. He’s joined by two guitar players, a bass player and a drummer who are mostly from his network of players at the University of North Texas and elsewhere.
“We have a lot of great musicians because I was around them and cultivated those relationships over a long period of time,” he said.
The show ends with Emerson’s arrangement of Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus. Although revved up with rock-and-roll instrumentation and a driving tempo, it’s the most straightforward and recognizable song in the show.
Asked if rock-and-roll can be reverent, Emerson said, “I think so. Absolutely. I mean, that depends on how the audience feels after they hear it.”
Outside the church
So far, “He Rules the World” has not been staged in a church, and that is by design, Peter Emerson said.
“If you as a churchgoer say, ‘Hey, I’m going to see this great Christmas show about the birth of Christ’ and you’re telling your next-door neighbor who’s not a believer, you don’t have a very good chance of getting them to go to your church with you to see it,” he said. “But if you say, ‘Hey, I’m going down to the arena or the theater or whatever, there’s this great rock concert about Christmas. Why don’t you come with me?’ I think they might be a little bit more apt to do it.”
“We do hope this is a great evangelical opportunity for people,” add Jennifer Emerson. “We hope the teenagers or young adults who come will invite their friends. We hope families will invite their neighbors. Again, it’s one thing to invite somebody to come to church with you, it’s another thing to invite them to a rock concert and I think a more accessible step for non-believers to take, and then it’s up to God.”
What happens with the show after its December run in Waco is unknown, but the Emersons are open to all possibilities. It could tour like Trans-Siberian Orchestra, or it might be a destination show. Two seasonal locations they are interested in are the Sight and Sound Theaters in Branson, Mo., and Lancaster, Penn.
This season, though, all eyes and ears are on Waco’s Hippodrome.