Show Theme Brainstorming - 2

Here are my current leading show concept ideas:

1. Le Petit Prince
Le Petit Prince is a children's novella by French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry that tells the story of a young prince who travels across planets and time to Earth and back to his love, a red rose. Despite its simplicity and fantasy, it makes for an elegant story with poignant themes of creativity, friendship, individuality, loneliness, loss, and human love. While originally written  in French, Le Petit Prince has been translated into English and several other languages. There have also been an opera, a ballet, a live stage production, and an animated movie, and other renditions of the original story. Not only do I personally like the story, but its simplicity and presence in our culture would make it easier for an audience to follow. The other renditions also include some musical material for arranging or inspiration. 

2. Out of the Blue
This concept comes out of one of my favorite devices for show design: color as theme. This allows several otherwise unrelated ideas to come together through subtle similarities and connections through a color. There are also several iconic musical works related to the color blue, including Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," Strauss's "The Blue Danube," ELO's "Mr. Blue Sky," and the entire genre of the blues. This show would be more abstract in nature, and the development would occur through a journey through emotions and sound. Movements could be titled different shades of blue, like sky, royal, navy, etc.  

​3. Flickering
This concept was inspired by some of my favorite choral pieces: Ēriks Ešenvalds's "Stars," David Dickau's "I Am Not Yours," and Eric Whitacre's "Sleep." While these pieces aren't very related in their content or thematic material, each has a powerful lyric about flickering lights. From here, I remembered the story of Haydn's Farewell Symphony No. 45, in which the players each have a candle that they extinguish one by one as they say "farewell" during the final movement. I also remembered Owl City's song "Firefly," which is similarly tangentially related to the theme of flickering, and John Mackey's "Xerxes," an angry concert march about the Persian king with a tendency to burn conquered cities. From this conglomeration of music, I would construct an arc that mirrored the life of a flame: darkness, ignition, burning, flickering, and dying back to darkness.