Reviews

By TIM TEEMAN, The Daily Beast

November 18, 2018

What a lovely space the Sheen Center For Thought & Culture’s Loreto Theater on Bleecker Street is: stately, warm, and welcoming. Appositely, the exquisitely performed All Is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914 is reaching out intimately and powerfully to audiences there.

Not all the seats were occupied at the performance this critic attended, and every seat should be. And, Broadway producers note: this 75-minute show would flourish on a bigger stage too.

The story is well-known: in the first year of World War One, hostilities along extensive sections of the Western Front late on Christmas Eve and into Christmas Day, 1914, ceased. English and German soldiers emerged from their respective trenches to cross ‘No man’s land’ and meet one another. For these few precious hours, the sound of gunfire ceased. Songs were sung, gifts exchanged, and—although this has been disputed—games of football played.

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By MICHAEL SOMMERS, New York Stage Review

November 18, 2018

A legendary incident of World War I occurred on Christmas Eve in 1914, when gunfire suddenly went quiet along stretches of the Western Front as British and German troops spontaneously observed an informal holiday truce during which time they climbed out of their trenches and met each other halfway across No Man’s Land.

All Is Calm, which opened tonight at the Sheen Center, is a touching musical tribute to that brief time when peace on Earth reigned over desolate battlefields. Created by Peter Rothstein, who stages this production by Theater Latté Da, the 75-minute show incorporates spoken excerpts from period letters, autobiographies, poetry, and military documents with more than 30 songs from those terrible times.

Told mostly from the British point of view, the documentary-style musical begins in an upbeat flurry of patriotic ditties and optimistic sentiments in August, 1914, as young men enlist and sail across the English Channel, confidently expecting to return home victoriously by Christmas.

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by GRAYDON ROYCE, Star Tribune

December 17, 2015

“All Is Calm” was first performed in a church auditorium in 2007. The nine singers of Cantus and three actors under the direction of Peter Rothstein presented this slender, poignant story of the Christmas Truce of World War I as a piece for radio listening — a concert with spoken word.

Hennepin Theatre Trust was eager to have Rothstein bring his show to the Pantages Theatre in downtown Minneapolis the following year and with the smallest bit of tinkering — a dark firmament, some twinkling stars and falling snow — the actors began to stretch their legs as they orated and the men of Cantus ably filled up the larger psychic space.

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