The Bluebird: A Christmas Musical

The perfect alternative for the much overdone “A Christmas Carol” that so many theater trudge out every year to please their audiences during the holidays.

So, we decided to look for something different. This old Maurice Maeterlinck play follows a similar plot – a greedy child wants everything for herself but knowing her family is poor, retires for the XMas evening knowing nothing will be there for her on Xmas morning.  But it also gives us a bit of the The Wizard of Oz where the children go off to a land far, far away only to find out that happiness was “in their own backyard all along.”

On Xmas eve, the children are awakened by the Fairy Berylune and sent off to the find the Bluebird. They set off that night accompanied by their dog, cat and Light who is now personified. In the end, the Bluebird was always waiting for them back home.  There’s an old Shirley Temple movie of The Bluebird and another in the 60s with a star studded cast including Jane Fonda as the Cat and very big flop of a movie.

The play musical was commissioned by The Sun Valley Repertory to inaugurated their new space with book & lyrics by Joel Beard and performed by the community actors.  It reminded me of another of working in the theater that is not about professionalism but about bringing together a community.  It’s not just about the people on stage though we had student actors from High School and a ballet class with a single boy.  But also all the designers and the volunteers running the show.  Then the audience who came to see the shows and hung around afterward eating cookies and egg nog.  Long lasting relationships are createdt his way and there’s a lot of respect, love, warmth, spirit and just plain good times which become memories.  Experiences are better gifts than items.  🙂

Here’s the score. I used a midi program called Vision and played the show from Mac SE/30 computer playing the sequences on the Proteus XR which used crude sampling but combined the samples with synthesized sound.  I can hear how I put the sound module (a rack mount machine) past it’s capacity.  Some of the decay does not sound natural and there’s a brittleness to it due to the way the patches were created.  The Proteus was crude by today’s standards but i feel proud of the music I got out of that machine.  Because the sequences were played on cue during the performance over the sound system, I could get very nicely balanced orchestra to voice with the mix of instruments under my control.  You’ll need to enjoy if for what it is.  Created more than 30 years ago in the pioneering days of using computers to make music.