Unbridled

Unbridled did not start as a musical. It started as roughly one hundred and eighty songs, written and recorded over years, long before anyone thought to ask what story they might be telling if you put them in the right order. Nineteen of them turned out to be telling the same one, and that story is Tom’s own.

One actor plays Tom at every age the show visits, from a six-year-old on Ashby Street in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1968, through the teenage years that follow, a first love, and a sudden move that ends that chapter before he is ready for it to end.

The second act carries him into adulthood, a community theater collaboration that becomes a tribute to a mentor who mattered, a relationship that costs him more than he expects, and a long stretch of quietly rebuilding himself through the kind of ordinary civic work nobody writes songs about, until eventually somebody did.

A switchman’s whole job is deciding which track a train ends up on. Unbridled treats Tom’s own life the same way, a string of ordinary-looking decisions that quietly determined everything that came after, and a score built entirely from the songs he was writing while he lived them.