Interview: Noah Live! producer Katie Miller on biblical stage shows, historical movies, and the 30th anniversary of Sight & Sound's "flagship" production
A new version of the epic stage show is coming to movie theatres this Thursday.
Katie Miller grew up in the theatre.
In 1976, several years before she was born, her grandparents founded Sight & Sound, a Christian theatre company that put on traveling multi-media shows.
In 1995, the company produced its first all-biblical show—a musical about Noah, complete with animals and a big Ark—and it was such a big hit that, for the next few decades, they made nothing but biblical spectaculars, which they now perform in two permanent locations in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and Branson, Missouri.
Miller, who was born in the mid-1980s, did a bit of acting as a child, but by the time Noah got started she had moved on to other aspects of the business, from working concessions to working with the animals.
She is now the company’s director of brand development, and in this and similar capacities, she has helped the company broaden its reach into filmed entertainment—starting with specialty screenings of their stage productions via Fathom Events. (I first interviewed her when Jonah: On Stage! came out in 2017.)
Now, after nearly three decades of telling purely biblical stories—all of which started on the stage—the company is making original theatrical films that tell other kinds of faith-based stories, starting with 2022’s I Heard the Bells (about 19th-century poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) and continuing with next year’s A Great Awakening (which concerns the 18th-century revivalist George Whitefield).
The company is still as dedicated as ever to its biblical stage musicals, though—and to making them available to moviegoers everywhere. And so, this week they are releasing Sight & Sound Presents: Noah - Live!, an all-new 30th-anniversary production of their “flagship” show, distributed by Fathom Entertainment.
I had a chance to talk to Katie about the new production, its special connection to the company’s history, and some of the changes that have happened to the company since the pandemic shut down their stage shows and Fathom screenings alike five years ago (“Had it not been for Covid, I don’t know that we ever would have launched a streaming platform or taken a step into feature films,” she says).
What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our chat.
PTC: I spoke to someone at Sight & Sound six years ago when another version of Noah came out, and as I understand it, this is a different version of Noah that is coming out this year. If that’s true, can you say how different it is?
KM: Sure. So, this is our 30th anniversary of Noah on stage here in Lancaster this year, and we’ve had over five million people experience the story since it first premiered in 1995, and we kind of had it in a rotation of shows to come back, and when we realized it was going to come back on its 30th anniversary, we knew we had to do a bit of a refresh. So we re-scored the whole show, there’s added songs and scenes, there’s some new animal faces for sure, but there’s also all of the main pillar moments that audiences have fallen in love with throughout the years. So, all of the animals running up and down the aisles, going into the Ark, that big Ark opening of Act 2, and just everything that people have come to love about the show—it was able to stay the same with a refreshed story and songs and some other elements as well.
PTC: The person I spoke to six years ago said your first few theatrical releases had initially been produced for DVD, so they were made with the home screen in mind—and I believe that included the Noah that came out six years ago—but he said that as you looked ahead to things like the Jesus movie and others, you were beginning to think in terms of shooting them cinematically to take advantage of the movie theatre space. So is that is that also a factor in the new version?
KM: Yes, a hundred percent. We had over a dozen cameras all throughout the theatre and on stage and hidden in set pieces, and we actually shifted to using cinematic lenses instead of some of the traditional broadcast cameras that we had been using in the past, so that it really does shine bright on that big screen.
PTC: The press release says the tallest set piece in the current version of Noah is original to the very first Noah production and is the only set piece to survive the fire that took place in the 1990s. Can you say what that set piece is?
KM: Yes, so the way that the show ends is we have an exterior Ark piece where Noah and his family are outside of the Ark, and then after they exit the stage that Ark turns into a cross—and when we had our fire in 1997, every set piece from every show we’d ever done was totally destroyed and the only set piece that survived the fire was this Ark-into-a-cross set. It’s a very fun special effect that happens, and we still use that original set piece to this day.
PTC: Wow, okay, that actually leads into another question I had. I regret to say I don’t remember the Noah musical very well. I do remember the Jonah one and the Moses one a little better, and I remember that Jesus appears in those musicals as a character, and so it sounds like there is that explicit Christian connection in the Noah story as well.
KM: Yes, absolutely. We make the correlation between the Ark being a place of safety for Noah and his family and how Jesus is our Ark of safety, and he is our way of salvation, and there is a narrow door, just like there was a door to walk through to get onto the Ark. There is a narrow path and a narrow door in following Jesus and that is a huge part of what this story points to.
PTC: The fact that it was, like, the cross piece that survived the fire—has that struck anybody as significant, or is that sort of reading too much into these things?
KM: No, I mean, I will say in the moment for us it felt very significant! It was a moment of, like, “Okay, the Lord is here and I can’t believe this is the one set piece that was not destroyed in all of this.” And it feels really special to be able to have it back on stage again.
PTC: One of the last times I wrote about Sight & Sound was when the trailer for Jesus came out a few years ago, and at the time it was going to come out at Easter 2020 and we all know how that turned out. So you launched a streaming service in 2020—
KM: Yes.
PTC: —and you talked about how you’re now shooting cinematically, so how do you look at it when you approach a new musical, now that you’re sort of doing it both for streaming and for theatres?
KM: Yeah, I mean for us we’ve gotten now into the habit of taking the shows into movie theatres first, and they eventually go on to our streaming platform and the medium is very similar, so we’re not really making changes for streaming beyond what we initially capture for movie theatres. I think it’s just an acknowledgement that, from when we first started capturing shows for DVD, they weren’t going on to the big screen, and TVs in other people’s homes were all that really needed to be there. But now that we’re going into movie theaters it’s an entirely different way of shooting, to make sure that the picture is crisp and the colour is right and the lights are bright, and the right brightness—you’re not getting, you know, your eyes burned out by spotlights either—so it is just a whole different way of looking at it as it unfolds.
PTC: I think Jesus might have been the first one that was intentionally made for theatres, and I can only imagine how that must have felt, to sort of have the theatrical possibility pulled out from under you right at the last minute. This is five years ago, so I don’t know, maybe you’re past all this now, but it’s the first time I’ve spoken to anybody from Sight & Sound since then.
KM: Yeah, I mean no, for sure, that whole year felt like a massive shift for us, from closing both locations to then not being able to take our show into movie theatres. At the same time, it also became the way that the Lord kind of used the season of brokenness and darkness to be able to almost, like, birth the next phase of Sight & Sound. So had it not been for Covid, I don’t know that we ever would have launched a streaming platform or taken a step into feature films, but the idea of taking our shows far beyond our four walls—out into not just the nation but the world—really came out of that season of being closed. And so, for us, 2020 became an entire turning point, I’ll say, of just who we are as a ministry and where we hope to go in the future.
PTC: Your Old Testament stories tend to have a connection to Jesus, and so I thought it was interesting that you were actually tackling the story of Jesus head-on. Have you had a chance to put that story in theatres since 2020, or is that one awaiting a big-screen second chance or revival down the road?
KM: Yeah, that one is still awaiting a second chance. It’s a show that we’ve streamed so many times on our streaming platform and it’s available for purchase now, but we haven’t taken it to movie theatres. So hopefully, one of these years coming down the pike, we’ll be able to do that.
PTC: I believe you’ve done at least one non-biblical story with Fathom Events as well, right?
KM: Yes we did. I Heard the Bells was our first feature film in 2022 and we just finished production on our second feature film and are in the middle of distribution conversations right now—with hopefully a fun announcement coming in just a couple of weeks—and we’re hoping for a spring movie theatre, not event, but movie theatre distribution for A Great Awakening.
PTC: I have not seen I Heard the Bells, but is that also a musical? And if it is—or even if it isn’t—is it based on a stage production or was it written for the screen from the get-go?
KM: It was written for the screen. It’s not a musical, it’s not biblical. We launched our feature films division with the hope of telling stories of people and events from history who changed the world because Christ first changed them. So not only did we change (or add, I guess, to) our way of storytelling, but we also are taking a step into different types of stories by doing stories that are still faith-based for sure, and mission-oriented, but ones that are not from the Bible specifically.
PTC: Now, my understanding is Sight & Sound got started roughly 50 years ago doing a mix of stories, and then about 30 years ago after you did Noah the first time you sort of settled into this Bible-story groove, if you will—like, it really became your specialty. Had you done other non-biblical stories since 1995?
KM: No, we have not! So, great brushing up on your history. 2026 is going to be our 50th anniversary year, and for the first almost 20 years of our history we were doing revue-style shows that had a mix of Bible elements but also modern-day scenes to them. They were more like revue-style shows. And once Noah premiered we kind of had a moment of going, “Oh, this is what we’re called to do—big spectacular Bible stories,” and we never looked back. And for the stage we still believe that. I think we know that Bible stories on stage is what the live theatre side is for us. But then there’s some stories on our hearts that we believe have been waiting to be told from the pages of history, and so for feature films, that’s more the lane of storytelling that we’re going towards.
PTC: Can I ask how you make those choices? Like, choosing what stories to tell. After almost 30 years of being just about Bible stories, how do you pick the stories to tell outside of that field, now that you’re getting in there?
KM: Yeah, for sure. A lot of prayer! So it doesn’t matter if it’s a story for film or a story for stage. We have a story team and our executive team that spends a lot of time praying, researching, kind of seeing what stories bubble to the top, and then from there we start to walk down towards, okay, if we’re going to be going to this story then what’s the message that the Lord wants to have us bring out of it? And it is a whole process—very collaborative—until we kind of land where we’re going in the future for the next story, whether stage or screen. And then our wonderful team of 800 people roll up their sleeves and get to work on the writing, directing, constructing, producing and then eventually bringing it to the stage or to movie theatres.
Sight & Sound Presents: Noah - Live! is coming to theatres across the US for one week only, beginning September 18. Click here or here for tickets and more info.