A unique theatrical experience, “Life Review: The Hospice Musical,” will be performed on May 9 as a one-night concert and live album recording in the Arellano Theater in Levering Hall on Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood Campus.
The hospice experience may not initially evoke thoughts of “musical theater,” but if music expresses that which cannot be put into words, the subject matter put to music makes a lot of sense. Benjamin Kintisch is a trained cantor and former chaplain from Columbia, Maryland. He created “Life Review” from real hospice patient stories over more than a decade, turning those conversations into songs.
The show has been performed before and received accolades at the Asheville Fringe Festival, the Charm City Fringe Festival, and virtually from London. It is a 2025 Maryland State Arts Council Creativity Grant recipient.
“Life Review: The Hospice Musical” is set in “Hopeful Hospice” – the final home for a group of hospice patients. The audience is witness to private conversations between the patients and their chaplain, a rabbi, transformed into song. Each patient’s story invites reflection on one’s own life, relationships, and memories.
“This is a musical about listening, about presence, and about what it means to truly be heard,” wrote Kintisch on his Kickstarter page for the project. He describes it as a cross between “A Chorus Line” and “Fiddler on the Roof.”
The May 9 performance will include five musicians from Peabody Institute playing the violin, cello, clarinet, flute, and piano. Five professional vocalists from Baltimore will perform the piece for this full live album recording, which will allow the creators to share the music beyond the concert hall.
Kintisch began the Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for covering costs of the May 9 performance and recording. There, he addressed the frequently-asked question, “Is this some kind of joke?”
“’Life Review: The Hospice Musical’ is a real show, a new musical comedy about love and loss in three seasons at a residential hospice,” Kintisch wrote. “Your questions ‘is this a joke’ is not an uncommon one. We have lots of good jokes in the dialogue, but we also take very seriously the important themes of our play.”
Those themes? The inevitability of death, celebration of love and friendship, grief and loss, disability, aging, and more. Kintisch wrote that he uses music “to engage with these topics with feeling and beauty,” and that ‘[a]n over-arching theme of the play is the power of story telling and holy listening.”
The show runs around 90 minutes, and following the performance there will be a dessert reception. For those interested, there will also be optional small group discussions related to themes highlighted in the show. Group choices include:
- “Spoiler alert!” – Dark humor and our shared mortality
- “Send Me a Sign!” – Theological Issues at End-of-Life
- “With These Hands” – the blessings and challenges of the body through aging and illness
- “Life Review” – an interactive story telling workshop
Tickets range in price from $23.18 to $108.55, and can be purchased until the day of the performance.
