Silent Night: Comic Artists' Night at the Opera

"Artists make bad soldiers."

--German Lt. Horstmayer of Silent Night

"Unsolicited criticism — Always a good seduction technique!"

—Anna Sørensen of Silent Night

[Silent Night] relates the tale of British, French, and German soldiers during World War I who disobeyed orders and spent the holiday not killing each other.

--Joel Vollmer

Jeremiah Halonie: As usual, it’s difficult to draw when the action is so amazing, you want to just lose yourself in what’s going on on-stage, but add to that the incredible sets and music this time around, and I had the most difficult time yet trying to draw what was going on and not just watch.





Kate Saturday: The French troops were quartered in this bombed-out Cathedral. I fell completely in love with it and drew it one thousand times. Barely a shell, it had a creaky fragility that was offset by its clean geometry. It was strong enough to support actors on its upper stories, in the same way that a nautilus shell is strong. Strong enough to support what, i don't know, tiny mollusk actors in a submarine drama perhaps.





Thomas Boguszewski: Watching this production warms the heart, but also gives one a sense of the terrible irony of war —where humanity is looked upon as "weird" and violence is the norm. I think the message of this play is not only that "Artists make bad soldiers," as Lieutenant Horstmayer points out at the beginning of the play, but also that good human beings make bad soldiers.



Lisa and Lee Blauersouth: Silent Night, the newest Opera in MN was at once grounded in both fact and myth and rides the line where the two meet. The event was real—a Christmas Eve Truce during the first World War, but it feels like a fairy tale or fable. The tales of it survived through letters and rumors and tales told by soldiers and civilians alike.



Check out more blogs and images at Joel Vollmer, MN Opera, and Diana Green!