Laura Little off-Broadway show to become PBS film
"All is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914," the theater production Laura Little brought to New York City last year, is being made into a film for PBS.
"It's funny how it all transpired," Little said Tuesday.
The Coeur d'Alene-based producer said she attended an event where she sat at a table with the CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Little said they got to chatting and she offered the CEO tickets to see "All is Calm," which premiered off Broadway last November as a Laura Little Theatrical Productions and Theater Latté Da show.
"She went and saw it and sent me flowers and said, 'Let’s make it a film,'" Little said.
Little and her team have been working on the project with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and WNET New York Public Media for a year. Filming begins in two weeks in Minneapolis, where the show was first brought to the stage as a radio musical drama under the direction of Theater Latté Da co-founder Peter Rothstein 13 years ago.
"There was just this feeling of satisfaction that somebody else saw the value in this production and that they'd be willing to go out on a limb for it," said Little, who first saw the show at Lake City Playhouse in 2014.
"All is Calm" is based on the true story of World War I enemies setting aside their differences on Christmas night 1914, coming together as friends and forgetting about the war for an unforgettable moment in history.
Coeur d'Alene's W.J. Lazerus, who is working as the executive producer and director of the PBS production, said he was ecstatic to hear that PBS wanted to make "All is Calm" into a TV production.
"This is a profound and important muscial piece that is perfect for the holiday season," he said. "The intimacy that it has, the acting that is so brilliant and the message it brings across is perfect for television. Television brings out the best in intimate situations; we can see people close up — in this case, war — and a realization of transformation and the juxtaposition of two differing forces in close proximity and what it means to those who are experiencing it, and to humankind on a grander scale."
Lazerus said Little has an amazing eye to know the potential in this show when she saw it on the local stage.
"People in Coeur d'Alene can be very proud of the talent we have here," he said. "We can take local projects, see something at a local venue and take it to a national scale. That's the surprising part of this area — it's much bigger than what is here locally."
The final version of the PBS production of "All is Calm" will be released at Christmastime 2020.