Grand Opera holiday show recreates the Christmas truce of WWI

Wichita Grand Opera is staging a bit of history for its holiday production.

“All is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914,” which will be on stage for three performances next weekend, depicts the real-life Christmas Day truce between Germany and the Allies during World War I.

“There’s a lot of Christmas carols from many different countries, since there were so many nationalities involved in the war,” Alan Held, artistic director for Wichita Grand Opera, said. “And there’s tunes that were common for the time period – war songs, songs the soldiers would sing, like ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ and those things.”

Fifteen vocalists will portray the soldiers, all singing a capella.

“It just has a wonderful sound. I think they did a great job of recreating what the sound would have been like in 1914,” Held said. “It’s got a lot of energy. It’s great to hear the men singing together on stage.”

In between the songs are the stories of real soldiers, said Dennis Arnold, Wichita Grand Opera president-CEO and the director of “All is Calm.”

“It actually has monologues taken from letters home from the front from the actual people who wrote them. It has snippets of those in and out of the music,” Arnold said. “It’s just really cool, very moving.”

After debuting in playwright Peter Rothstein’s home state of Minnesota, “All is Calm” made its off-Broadway debut for six weeks last year, where it earned a Drama Desk Award for “unique theatrical experience.”

In a 2018 interview with Playbill magazine, Rothstein said the production is the result of years of research.

“I wanted to tell the story in their own words,” he told an interviewer. “For decades, the truce was considered a romantic fable, fiction, and I wanted to give legitimate voice to this remarkable moment that had somehow been denied its rightful place in history. I cannot express how gratifying it has been to share the story of these heroic men, in their own words, across the country and around the globe.”

The fully staged production at the company’s new home at the Wichita Center for the Performing Arts will include rear-projection screenings of photographs from the era, and the lobby will have pieces on loan from the National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Mo.

“We’re trying to make it an immersive experience,” Arnold said.

The production will tour to McPherson and Kingman schools, and open a special matinee performance for students, Held and Arnold said.

“All is Calm” is the first show of the 2019-2020 season for Wichita Grand Opera, with Held – a world-renowned bass-baritone and director of the Wichita State University opera program – as artistic director, as well as its new home after 18 years at Century II.

“It’s the perfect space for us,” Held said of the 470-seat theater. “It’s the right size and technically it can handle what we want to do. It’s going to bring a much more intimate space for the opera, and it will allow us to stage things the way we couldn’t have done at Century II, because we have the theater to rehearse in. We didn’t have the time in the theater when we were in Century II.”

Arnold said the WCPA space has its own parking lot, dressing rooms and scene shop.

“We can move stuff directly from our back parking lot right onto the stage,” Arnold said. “We’re very happy with it, and I think our patrons will be too.”

The rest of the season includes a big-band dance on the night of Valentine’s Day at the Century II exhibition hall; Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide,” as well as the return of “Opera on the Lake” at Bradley Fair.

Held said with a new artistic director and a new home, it’s “a huge change for the company.”

“Any time you change administration like this, it’s a big deal. It’s kind of learning to walk again, because there were things that needed to be readjusted and reprioritized,” he said. “We’ve spent the past year doing exactly that.”

Arnold, president-CEO since mid-2018, said the company is interested in collaborations with other arts groups, including one already set with On the Fly, an aerial entertainment company specializing in staged flying events and acrobatics that was featured on “America’s Got Talent.”

The company will rehearse the space and debut shows that will go onto cruise ships and on tours, Arnold said. Its first public performances at the WCPA will be in late January and early February.

‘ALL IS CALM: THE CHRISTMAS TRUCE OF 1914’

When: 7:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday, Dec. 13-14; 2 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 15

Where: Wichita Center for the Performing Arts, 9112 E. Central

Tickets: $30-$50, with $75 VIP tickets, by calling 262-8054 or online at wichitagrandopera.org