Come walk with the ghost in 2024!
"A Christmas Carol"
Unity High School Aud., Orange City, IA, Nov. 23 at 7:30 pm
Gayville Hall, Gayville, SD Dec. 1st at 2 pm
Old Courthouse Museum, Sioux Falls, SD, Dec. 6th at Noon
Dakota Wesleyan University, Black Box Theatre, at 1300 McGovern Ave., Dec. 11th at 7:30 pm
Good Sam Society, Sioux Falls (private), Dec. 12th at 6 pm
Prince of Peace, Sioux Falls, (private), TBD
From the very beginning of the show, you know that you're in for something completely different. The music begins and sets the mood, then the reading takes its turn and the listener is not impatient for one or the other - it is an equal sharing of the dramatic delights of words and sound.
This is the most important part of the process. The writer of the script and the music programmer get together and decide what music is to back up a dramatic segment of the show. Sometimes it's not what you expect it to be! The music puts the emotional "spin" to the actors interpretation.
Welcome!
Words & Music
mood matching
The concept of the show is an old one: a melodrama or “melody drama,” in which music and words take equal part in the presentation. The lights come up on the actor who begins the story and then the lights go up on the music which follows the situation and adds to its drama!
The Concept
from idea to form
“It is amazing how much of our best music lends itself to storytelling. In fact, it is storytelling. This year I was reading a new translation of Andersen’s fairy tales. I remembered my grandmother telling me some of these stories when I was a child in Poland, but I hadn’t yet read them as an adult. I was amazed at how great they were for grown up people, too. I started to imagine an evening full of the same weird beauty and strangeness that I was picking up from the tales...The Show
story and sound
“This is one of my all-time favorite stories,” says Darrel Fickbohm, the actor from the group. “We’re very eager to bring it to Mitchell, Gayville, and Sioux Falls. The story is so hopeful, and the explosion of holiday spirit at the end is not fake in any way—the tale earns every laugh and tear. In A Christmas Carol, we see what we all want to believe can happen: that someone can change—really change for the better. This idea seems so impossible, these days. We’re so cynical. We seem convinced that once we’re older and ‘set in our ways,’ that we’re done listening to good advice.”
— Darrel Fickbohm, actor
My name is Magdalena...
OUR STORY! In the spring of 2002 a group of international master-level musicians committed to making music in South Dakota began performing programs that combined interesting stories with original, never before heard arrangements of the world’s greatest ensemble music.