Frederick Douglass gets the Hamilton treatment with new musical

Cornelius Smith Jr as Frederick Douglass and the cast of American Prophet. Photograph: Arena Stage

For Kenneth Morris, sitting in a darkened theatre among hundreds of people, it was a moment of a communion with a man he never met but whose light he carries wherever he goes.

Morris is the great-great-great-grandson of Frederick Douglass, abolitionist, orator and polymath. On Thursday he joined a Washington audience that included the supreme court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson for the world premiere of American Prophet, a stage musical powered by Douglass’s speeches and writings.