Exclusive: Read an Excerpt from BARK OF MILLIONS, by Taylor Mac & Matt Ray

Based on Taylor Mac and Matt Ray’s spectacular rock opera, Bark of Millions brings the experience of the show to the page in a gorgeous two-volume box set. It’s an electrifying collision of music, performance, drag spectacle, and queer joy!

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Bark of Millions the show is an electrifying collision of performance, live music, and drag spectacle in a four-hour rock opera celebration of queerness. The show features 55 original songs by theater masterminds Taylor Mac, a MacArthur Fellow, Ibsen Award winner, and Pulitzer Prize finalist, and Matt Ray, Obie Award-winning composer. “Why 55? It’s one for every year following Stonewall.” The songs are performed by a powerhouse collective of 23 International Artists. With the fierce elation of a pride parade, Bark of Millions is a luxuriant, provocative spectacle unlike any other. 

Bark of Millions the book is an expression and extension of this transportive experience. It’s for the queer community and for theater obsessives and musicians and performers. Included in the box set are a book of lyrics and a book of music lead sheets for 50 of the songs. BroadwayWorld is very excited to bring you an excerpt from the box set below:

THE BARK OF MILLIONS

The Bark of Millions
Brings the sun, victorious, again
The Bark of Millions
Brings the sun, victorious, again

And the bark is a boat, made from a tree
And a bark is a shout and a begging to be seen
And the boat has a captain and the captain's name is Atum
Atum is Ra and Ra is Atum

And Ra is the first God And the first God birthed the world
And the world birthed the human
So the human comes from Arum
In the Bark of Millions

And Atum is queer, mixing genders and desire
So the god who birthed the world who birthed the one who gave us fire
And the one who filled the Nile and the one inside a thigh
Every demigod and child, all the way to you and I

Yes the one birthed in straw
From the real to the pretenders
They were all birthed from our Ra
So were made between the genders
In the Bark of Millions

And the Bark of Millions is a boat that's in the sky
Where we're chased into the darkness and do battle or we die
In the dawn we arrive and with us bring the sun
"Til the setting of it starts what the living has begun

And the millions are the years
And the battles are the songs
And the millions are us queers
As the years all pass along
In the Bark of Millions

The Bark of Millions
Brings the sun, victorious, again
The Bark of Millions
Brings the sun, victorious, again
Again