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Baba Aladura: Staging the Founder of the Cherubim and Seraphim Church

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Baba Aladura: Staging the Founder of the Cherubim and Seraphim Church

When the Cherubim and Seraphim Church marked its hundredth anniversary in 2025, it chose to tell its own founding story not through another documentary but through live theatre. Baba Aladura: Moses Orimolade Odyssey, a stage play musical directed by Makinde Adeniran, president of the National Association of Nigerian Theatre Arts Practitioners, premiered on November 8, 2025, at Terra Kulture in Lagos, narrated by the actor Toyin Osinaike and staged as the centerpiece of an event billed as Anathema in Concert 3.0 and the White Garment Experience 2025.

The production is a direct continuation of the project behind the 2022 docudrama Anathema, made by the same company, Cheser Media Inc, under executive producer Sam Ogunyooye. Where the film gathered testimony from present day members and outsiders, the play reaches back to the church's origin, retracing Moses Orimolade Tunolase's journey from humble beginnings in Ikare, Ekiti State, to the spiritual authority the church's own account credits him with, including a reported prayer said to have halted the erosion of Lagos's Bar Beach. Its director has called it a common story, one of an ordinary man rising through faith rather than privilege, told with a fusion of narration, drama and live music that gives the production its billing as a variety of devotional performance rather than a straightforward reenactment.

Musical performances from the Anathema Music Group and Anathema Choir ran alongside the narrated drama, tying the stage production back to the same worship music tradition that Aladura congregations carry into ordinary services, so that a night built to commemorate one founder's life also put the wider Cherubim and Seraphim musical tradition in front of a paying, general audience for the first time in this format.

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