From Emma – If Music Be the Food of Love (and Christmas), Play On

So okay, it’s past Thanksgiving, which means that we’re officially into the Christmas Muzak season.

Here at Christmas City Follies Central Station, however, we’ve been officially into that Christmas music mindset since the end of October. We’ve been caroling and carrying on in the Christmas spirit for going on six weeks now. To some degree, it’s easy to get tired of that, deliberately immersing ourselves in Christmas from end of October onward, but I don’t know. I have too many fond memories of Christmas music to hold that much against it.

On the second day of rehearsal, we all brought in our respective musical instruments and muddled through “Silent Night” on the snare drum, uke, bass, flute (please forgive its piercing loudness), trombone (or Mary singing through the trombone part), oboe, sax, and keyboard (I think). Take a listen to our fledgling first efforts as a Follies band.

We sound clunky and middle school music class-y, and I love it, as our first step into the musical world of this year’s Follies.

And I love the way it reminds me of the completely different rendition of “Silent Night” that we did last year, with lights dancing in the darkness while we sang, a little out of breath and constantly checking ourselves to make sure the choreography was right and that our lights were lit but knowing that the effort of nitpicking was worth the result.

And I love the way it reminds me of singing “Silent Night” in high school choir, simple a capella, hauntingly lovely, with the whole audience raggedly singing along, and that incredible feeling of unity granted through simply singing together.

And beyond that, I love the way that the Follies score doesn’t restrict itself to Christmas carols, reaching out to include Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Judy Garland, Barbara Streisand, Michael Jackson, Journey. Any song with a word or three about love and joy is rendered seasonally appropriate in the hands of the cast, because love and joy are what’s seasonally appropriate.

Tonight, we open a new Follies, rife with humor and heart, costume quick changes and ridiculous props, new characters and old. And music – lots of wonderful, beautiful, silly, delicious, epic, intimate, absurd, sweet music. We hope you’ll be there, sitting in the front row, humming along, singing and dancing all the way home.