INTERVIEW: Docu-musical depicting WWI Christmas Truce comes to PBS
Photo: The ensemble at Theater Latté Da brings to life the Christmas Truce of 1914 in All Is Calm. Photo courtesy of Dan Norman / Provided by PBS with permission.
The so-called Christmas Truce of 1914 was a remarkable footnote in history that still provides poignancy more than 100 years later. During the violent turmoil of World War I, troops on both the Allied side and the German side decided to lay down their arms and soak in some momentary peece. These young men did what they normally did around Dec. 25: They celebrated Christmas and sang a song or two.
The drama of this historical episode is the subject of the docu-musical All Is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914, first created by Theater Latté Da in Minneapolis and now set to premiere on PBS starting Friday, Nov. 27 (streaming will be available starting Dec. 15 at pbs.org, and the New York City area premiere on Thirteen is set for Dec. 20 at 12 p.m.).
At the center of the production, which has toured extensively throughout the United States, is Peter Rothstein, founding artistic director of Theater Latté Da.
“I run a theater company in Minneapolis, and we produced All Is Calm in 2007,” Rothstein said in a recent phone interview. “And it first premiered more as a cross between a radio drama and a concert. … So I wrote it as a piece between a collaboration between my company and Cantus, a male vocal ensemble based here in the Twin Cities. When I first approached Cantus about collaborating on this idea, I said I really don’t know what form it will take. I’ve been wanting to write a piece about the Christmas Truce for a number of years, but was really struggling with what form to do that. The climax of this story is the lack of conflict, which doesn’t make for great drama, so I was just struggling on what form it wanted to take.”
To help with his writer’s block, Rothstein booked a flight to Europe and started to research the Christmas Truce in archive centers in Belgium, Germany, France and England. He wanted to read the first-hand accounts of that Christmas night.
“And spending time in those archive centers and museums allowed me to arrive at this idea: If I could tell it in their own words, it would have much more power than any kind of piece of fiction I would create in order to tell the story,” he said. “So that’s where this idea of a docu-musical arrived. I think the Christmas Truce has been disputed throughout history as to whether it actually happened, how significant an event it was, how large of an event it was, how many men took part in it, and I believe that news of the Christmas Truce was squashed because the propaganda machine of World War I did not want news of this fraternization with the enemy to reach the home front — or they would lose all support for the war.”
What TV viewers will experience on PBS is a hybrid piece that combines documentary theater, a cappella songs and recitations of letters from the WWI era. This particular production was filmed on location at The Ritz Theater, the home of Theater Latté Da (when a pandemic isn’t raging). This current form of the play is quite different than its early iterations.
“After we premiered it, I returned to Europe the next year, knowing that I wanted to further develop the piece into more of a piece of theater, so I actually returned to those archive centers numerous times over the last dozen years,” Rothstein said. “As we were reaching the centennial of the war, a lot of those museums and archive centers had a new rigor for the centennial, so new documents, new research was being brought to the forefront. And I wanted to capture that, so the piece has been rewritten over a decade. I continued to finesse the piece.”
Everything that was included in the original version of All Is Calm more than a decade ago is still present and accounted for, but that “radio drama” only ran 53 minutes. This PBS version runs longer, coming in at more than one hour. There are additional songs and text. Many of these changes were inspired by audience members who saw the play while it was on tour.
“We toured the piece for about 10 years before taking it to New York, and I did a lot of post-show Q&As on the piece,” Rothstein said. “And the questions seemed to be the same with audience responses, so I thought, oh, if I could answer some of these questions with the piece that would be great. Everyone was more curious about the truce itself, what did they actually do during that time, and what were some of the power dynamics that were in place and brewing outside this truce. So I fleshed out the piece … to address some of those questions that continued to come up.”
He added: “The premiere of it was really a concert. Men were just in black suits. It was three actors and nine singers. The three actors delivered all of the text and didn’t sing at all, and then about five years ago, we rethought it and cast singer-actors. And now a cast of 10 deliver all of the text and all of the singing, and we brought on designers. So the piece now is still very spare, but it now has scenery and costumes and lighting and props and much more staging. So it’s much more visually compelling as we fleshed it out over the years, so what people will see on PBS is the piece when it was locked when we brought it to New York off-Broadway in 2018. And that’s the piece that was captured for PBS.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
All Is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914 will premiere Friday, Nov. 27 on PBS, with a streaming premiere set for Dec. 15 on pbs.org. The New York City area premiere on Thirteen is scheduled for Dec. 20 at 12 p.m. Click here for more information.
