Filled with colourful costumes, music, song and dance The Life of a Fiddle musical comes to the Gibraltar Room stage this weekend featuring the Cariboo Chilcotin Youth Fiddlers.
The Life of a Fiddle tells the tale of a particular fiddle that is bought, sold, borrowed, traded and stolen. This fiddle crosses borders, seas and cultures.
The audience is invited to imagine who has held this fiddle in their hands, has danced to its lively rhythms, or has wept to its sweet sounds.
“I’m pretty excited for the whole thing,” says Ingrid Johnston, the group’s primary instructor. “It’s been my life’s work for the past two years.”
Johnston and internationally acclaimed fiddler and fiddle instructor Gordon Stobbe collaborated on choosing and arranging the music with local and visiting instructors.
The Studio Theatre’s Michael Rawluk and Grade 12 student Haley Richardson will be narrating the show which brings together 35 performers from very young fiddlers to adults playing fiddle, piano and guitar.
One of the dances the group is learning is a traditional Maypole Dance, Johnston said.
Stobbe makes his home in Nova Scotia and has visited Williams Lake two or three times a year to work with the young fiddlers and with Johnston to choose and arrange music for the show.
Stobbe plays fiddle and has a background in both dramatic and musical theatre which included having a television show for eight years in Nova Scotia.
He said they also worked on arranging the music with noted Canadian fiddlers and workshop leaders James Stephens, Roxanna Sabir and Calvin Cairns and local mentors Greg Nixon (guitar), Jenny Howell (fiddle), Amy Hanson (fiddle) and Madison Magnowski (piano).
This week the Cariboo Chilcotin Youth Fiddle Society members were also among the Cariboo Festival competitors chosen to perform at the festival’s Honours Concert held Saturday evening, May 6 at Cariboo Bethel Church.
The fiddlers received the Williams Lake Old Time Fiddlers Ensemble Bursary. Various individual members of the group also took home awards presented during the concert.
The Life of a Fiddle will be on stage at the Gibraltar Room Saturday, May 13 starting at 7 p.m. (doors open at 6:15 p.m.) and Sunday, May 14 starting at 2 p.m. (doors open at 1:15 p.m.).
A concession will be available.
Tickets are $20 for adults and $10 for children and are available at the Open Book