The Creche Collector
Design by Kent Landrum
The Christmas Musical at the Northwest Church is not really a musical this year, though everyone keeps referring to it that way. I wrote about 10 different starts to songs just to see if I could get musical juices flowing, but in the end, we decided to do a straight play with some choral music surrounding it. The synopsis runs like this:
When Will Callus, a seventeen-year-old foster child brings his crèche collection to the Leffermann home, Cole Davis, a cynical newspaperman with a weakness for a good story, gets curious about Will's past. As the Leffermanns and their small church community prepare for another Living Nativity, Cole traces the mystery of this young boy's obsession with Christ's birth through a menagerie of offbeat characters, and in the process finds what both he and Will have been searching for all along.
A couple of rewrites later, that's the basic idea, but things have changed a bit. And as I tell them everyday, the play needs one more major rewrite, but we're out of time. So hopefully, I'll revisit it and get it right after the first of the year. But I've said that before...
Rehearsals have been a real joy. I've been working with these actors for several years now, and we are starting to see great improvement in the ability to speak and play action. The set design has created a bit of a stir just because it's a thrust stage that takes up a huge amount of room, costing us chairs in the audience, but in the end, the relationship between actor and audience is going to be pretty magical because of the space.
We run December 7, 8, and 9, with both a matinee and an evening performance on the 9th. Evening performances are at 7:30, and the Saturday Matinee is at 2:00. Come if you can, but get there early, because seating is going to be somewhat limited.
The Northwest Church
15555 15th Ave NE.
Shoreline, WA
I think it will be worth your time.
8:22:01 AM 
