Holiday Harmonies with Heart: Songs for a Winter’s Night

Is it a coincidence that so many holiday shows are about finding light in the darkness? From Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol to It’s a Wonderful Life, the seasonal classics tend to pay tribute to the power of community banding together—a sentiment that Criselda Mierau, artistic director of So Noted Singers and Acting Out Musical Theatre, thinks we can all use a little more of these days.

“I do think there is something about the culture of Christmas,” she says. “Not just our culture or our society, but the culture of Christmas that does, in fact, give people hope.

“A lot of my shows actually tend to be about hope,” Mierau continues, “because I am in fact a big proponent of it.”

That idea is central to Songs for a Winter’s Night, Mierau’s latest showcase for her choirs and theatre troupe. Set in a Christmas market, it follows a young man struggling with dark thoughts, and in desperate need of a brightening. Which is where the people he meets—and the choirs—come in.

“You’d think it’s almost a re-telling of Dickens, Scrooge, but it's not because we're dealing here with a young man who clearly has some depression,” Mierau says. “So it becomes a little more complicated, a little more real, And that makes the choir really, really important. Because in a Christmas show, you still wanna see all the joy and all the fun and all of that energy, and they supply it in spades.”

She’d written the script years ago, and revisiting it this year, knew it was the perfect season to put it up. It’ll feature the So Noted mixed choir, Acting Out Musical Theatre, and a few guest appearances from Mireau’s other choirs, Forte Plus and Cleopatra Treble Voices. And the Christmas Market it’s set at is a very real one: for an hour before showtime, attendees can shop the goods of actual local vendors, sip mulled wine, and snack on festive treats. Mireau notes that she’d reached out to see if any locals might be interested in making the script’s fictional market into something more tangible, and found tons of interest.

“They came out easily and in droves, and we only had room for 12,” she says. “So we actually have a waiting list at this point.”

While many of the show’s songs are seasonal classics, among more contemporary offerings—the title comes from a Gordon Lightfoot song that’s in the mix—Mireau notes the standards are being sung in new ways, and, in some cases, at surprising speeds.

“We're singing ‘Jingle Bells’, but it ain't your grandma's ‘Jingle Bells’,” she laughs. “It’s unexpected. It changes meter all over the place and it goes at breakneck speed—the musical term is called ‘presto’, and yes, we sing it at ‘presto’. We're doing a jazz waltz in five-four of ‘We Three Kings’—it's just a little bit different. You will hear familiar stuff, but you might hear them in a slightly new way.”

As to why some of these songs have proven to endure as the cultural touchstones they are, Mireau sees them as connected to the big festive sentiment we all need around this time of year.

“I really believe that the hope and the joy—that spirit of Christmas as we all like to refer to it, whatever that may mean—is somehow embedded in these songs.”

Songs For A Winter’s Night plays at 2pm and 7pm on Saturday, December 6th at St. Albert United Church. Advance tickets available at sonoted.ca.

Article written by Paul Blinov

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