LONG SHOT: The Origin Story
Fr. Kyle Kowalczyk
Long Shot received a staged reading during our 2025 New Works Festival.
I first read “Longshot” 20 years ago. It was a screenplay written by my writing mentor, Haynes Brooke. I absolutely loved it. So, 10 years later, I asked him if I could adapt it into a stage play. He gave me his blessing and I got to work. I had to do a lot of major changes to the structure, the theme, the characters, and the locations. The only thing that stayed more or less the same was Melvin’s story. The script sat for 5 years, until after Catholic Young Adults: The Musical when Chad Berg said he’d be interested in composing a musical with me. I don’t remember if I was planning on it being a musical, but it made perfect sense. So we got to work.
There is a lot of back and forth when writing a musical. I would write a draft, and Chad would write a song, and then we would realize that there was too much redundancy and I would have to tweak the script, or the song was in the wrong place and we had to move it, back and forth, back and forth. Due to life circumstances, we would work rather sporadically, making great strides and then doing nothing for months. Finally, MtBT gave us a deadline and we had about 3 months (about the amount of time Melvin has to live in our story) to finish the last 7 songs, which we did! I hope you like it. I hope Haynes will like it too.
FR. KYLE KOWALCZYK is one of the co-founders of Missed the Boat Theatre and its Chief Visioning Officer. He fell in love with theatre his sophomore year of high school and wrote his first play his senior year. He went on to major in television production with a minor in theatre, and after graduating college received a certificate in writing from Act One, an intensive Hollywood- based screenwriting program for Christian artists. While he was in seminary, he got a master’s in Catholic studies and founded the St. Paul Seminary Theatre, producing, writing, directing, and acting in plays until he was ordained in 2016. He considers MtBT his apostolate and has been truly blessed to see how many devoutly Catholic artists have been impacted by this ministry. “When we do theatre, we are many parts but one body, giving a beautiful gift to our brothers and sisters, all for the greater glory of God!”
CHAD BERG is making his composing debut with Long Shot. A classically trained singer, Chad was the founder and arranger of the University of St. Thomas’ male a cappella group, the Summit Singers. His most recent stage appearances were the original production of CYA (Tyler) and MtBT’s cabarets. Chad’s compositional style draws on elements from the musical theatre he grew up with—the stylistic variety of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, the sweeping ballads of Wicked, the raw vulnerability of Dear Evan Hansen, and the musical motifs (and yes, the rapping!) of Hamilton. Outside of music, Chad works in banking and enjoys spending time with his wife and two young girls. He is deeply grateful to MtBT, especially Fr. Kyle, for the opportunity to bring Long Shot to life, and he looks forward to one day returning to the stage alongside his daughters when they are old enough.
