Long before “The Odyssey” broke box office records worldwide, elementary school students in Hanover had forged a special relationship with this epic poem. But instead of IMAX cameras and on-location shoots, these kids had renditions of classic rock songs to tell their tales on the music room risers.
Every year, Ray School fifth graders performed in a musical called “Odyssey Rock,” where the hundreds-of-years-old epic tale was retold through music. With the backing of Ray School faculty, 10- and 11-year-olds learned the story of “The Odyssey” through songs like “Odysseus is Back” (set to the tune of “My Boyfriend’s Back”) or “Warriors B Goode” (set to “Johnny B Goode”). By embodying the characters of Odysseus, Athena or Circe, Hanover students developed a unique relationship to the tale that still endures today.
‘In your English class you’ll know it, and now we’re here to show it’
The Ray School’s “Odyssey Rock” story begins in the early ’90s, when Ashley Milliken had just started teaching at the school and shared a few class sections with fifth-grade teacher Dan Bell. The Greek myths were part of their curriculum, and after devising a smaller play about them for his classes, Bell wanted to expand. That’s when Milliken mentioned that her high school in Massachusetts did a spoof on “The Odyssey.”
“It stayed with me forever,” Milliken said in an interview. “I said, ‘You have to do this.’”
Milliken tracked down the original writer of the songs and text, Melissa Levis, who was a classmate of hers. Levis graciously allowed the school to use “Odyssey Rock” and sent Milliken a recording.
“I took the video and looked at it,” said Bell, “and I had to rewrite a lot of the script and some of the lyrics in the songs to get them appropriate for fifth grade. But there were so many keepers in that video when it came to songs.”
Bell kept four songs from the original, including “Warriors B Goode,” “Call out the Fleet” (originally “Splish Splash”), and an original song Levis wrote for Penelope, “Odysseus Where Are You.” He also added a few songs, rewriting the lyrics to classics like “I Feel Pretty” (which became the Lotus Eaters’ “I Feel Silly”) and “Love Potion Number Nine” (which became Circe’s “Pig Potion Number Nine”).
But after the writing came the execution.
“I got the tape, I’m writing the script, and then I thought, we need some backup music for this,” Bell said. “Then — and this is providence — two colleagues of mine actually played in a band for over a decade, and they played a lot of oldies: Cameron Cross and Erik von Ammon.”
Bell invited Cross and von Ammon to listen to a couple of the songs he’d rewritten and asked if they could learn them. Turns out, they already knew them.
“They were excited about it,” Bell said. “They were hooked right away.”
The first production of “Odyssey Rock” featured Bell on lead guitar, Cross on bass, von Ammon on percussion and music teacher Donna Butler on piano. Butler also led the students in learning the songs in their music classes, while art teacher Robin Henry helped with the props like swords and shields.
Students would do a couple of school-only performances, and the run would culminate in a Friday performance for family. Bell recalls one father coming up to him at the end of the first performance full of praise.
“He said, ‘I’ve got four kids, two through high school, I’ve been to every one of their plays, and nothing compares to this one,’” Bell said. “So that’s when I thought, we’ve got a keeper here.”
‘Such a silly song, such a silly me’
“Odyssey Rock” was a quick hit with the students, faculty and the community at large.
But after spending a hefty amount of time creating the production, Bell was, as he put it, “exhausted.” So the second year, Bell asked his teacher intern, Kurt Feuer, who had a background in acting, to direct the students. Feuer eventually became a fifth-grade teacher himself and led the “Iliad” and “Odyssey” curriculum in his own class.
“Each student told an ‘Odyssey’ story in my class,” Feuer said. “I also had every kid listen to a tape, then make an illustrated version of the story. So we really drilled ‘The Odyssey’ into these kids.”
The coordination between classroom and stage became one of the key things that made the stories stick in students’ heads over the years.
“When you learn about [‘The Odyssey’] in two different ways, through music and literature, students would have much more knowledge about who these people were and how they functioned,” Feuer said. “’The Odyssey’ is a collection of stories. It’s very episodic — kids can grab onto whichever one they want and be that person, and admire, or hate, that person.”
Bell handled casting every year as well — not a small feat for roughly 60 10- and 11-year-olds.
Bell would invite the classes to watch the previous year’s video and have students note the top three roles they’d like to play.
“Some of the boys, all they wanted was to be a Greek warrior because all they wanted was a sword and shield, so that was easy,” Bell said. “One year there were two girls dying to be Helen, so I ended up making a second scene for Helen.”
The efforts and creativity were worth it, as “Odyssey Rock” became a fixture of the Ray School.
“We had a couple performances during the day for kids from other grades to see it,” Feuer said, “so it became sort of a rite of passage for kids to say, ‘Oh boy, we’ll get to do that.’”
Feuer standardized the process, finding a routine that worked for faculty and students through the years.
“The enthusiasm was there because I was enthusiastic,” Feuer said. “We made it so fun. It was a little silly, but that’s perfect for the age.”
“That was my peak in teaching,” Bell said. “It was exhausting — it was a lot of work — but it was very rewarding. Especially with the last show, for all the parents, the kids were just shining for it.”
“To have the kids respond the way they did was priceless,” said Feuer. “The professionalism though, we kept the bar very high,” he added. “We made sure they knew all their lines. And there were a lot of lines!”
Feuer eventually retired from the Ray School, and as Bell got older, he passed on the directing duties to a newer fifth-grade teacher, Shane Clifford. When Bell retired in 2015, Clifford kept the musical going, but it ultimately stopped around the pandemic, after more than 20 years.
Now, with “The Odyssey” back in theaters, Ray School students and faculty are recalling how much “Odyssey Rock” has followed them throughout their lives.
Bell said he was recently at Lou’s on Main Street, “and there was a girl working there and she comes up and says, ‘Are you Mr. Bell? Do you remember the Odyssey?’”
Bell and the former student reminisced about how she did the Laestrygonian story.
“With this Nolan movie,” Bell said, “I’ve been thinking about how many kids are seeing it and remembering old Mr. Bell!”
Even Milliken still remembers her original performance.
“I still sing them, absolutely,” she said. “They’ll come into my head!”
As for the new movie, what did Kurt Feuer think?
“Ours was better,” he said with a smile.