An Interview With Steven Davison - Part 2
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Holiday was terrifying, I will tell you that. It was terrifying. I agonized over that show because you’re taking something away and putting something else out there and people may or may not like that. There was a lot of negative response when people heard they were doing the show. "What do you mean? You can’t do that. You can’t take away my Believe". The great thing was it was about Christmas, or the Holidays. The biggest thing about that is that it’s filled with memories also. But we took you on a different version. When we did the first show it was about using Disney and what Disney does with animated features, in a sense, or what the park does with them, with its magic to have you recall those feelings that take you from adventure to fantasy to laughter. Christmas was all about making you go back inside yourself. So when it opened, the show is very - again, it manipulates you because we started of with that song. It talks about do you remember, do you remember going here? Do you remember this? Do you remember that? If you actually analyze the song, it’s starts out with steps. It talks about do you remember Santa, reindeer, blue and the farther you get into it the song talks about do you remember that feeling, do you remember the caring, do you remember the sharing, do you remember what’s really important about it and at the very end it says just remember one more time and we collapse you into a kid and we do the toy soldier thing. We go into Dreidel and Toyland and play that old piece, and by the end of it with Two Front Teeth you’re kind of laughing and we kind of make you feel like a kid again. So we make you that child and then we send you home.

"I'll Be Home For Chirstmas"

Very simply with I’ll be Home for Christmas with those five words, just by doing that. Even originally, when we opened the show, the floors kept going like every four beats there was a floor and I said what if we just let that linger because it almost felt like they were just dying out as the next one happened. It really kind of pulled you back. So we sent you home and then we did that special piece and we kind of bounced around. I never thought I would ever sell Silent Night. I never thought it would hit the door step. The likes of an audience, that’s a huge piece of it. I said let’s try it. Let’s see what people think of it. We picked a great tune that everyone knows, everyone knows Silent Night. So we did the star of wonder piece, which is my favorite orchestral piece by Don Harper who writes the shows for me. When the orchestra recorded it, it was amazing. Then we went to Silent Night and we’re going to end on one thing and it worked like gangbusters.

Then we gave you the spirit back The old finale about the spirit of Christmas and getting people excited and when I was working with the composer Don Harper, I said, I want carol the bells to be in a fight with Russian dance and it’s like the church choir was going to do this thing with orchestra and bell choir but they ran out of time so we told the bell choir they couldn’t do it. We basically composed this wild crazy crashing symphony piece that worked pretty well. If you watch the show it’s all about red and green at that point. When we got to the end I literally pitched there and went from red to the green, red to the green, red to the green to the red to the green, red to the green to the red to the green, red to the green to the red to the green and you wear everybody out. In the sky we do exactly that. your eye focuses on that until you explode.

"Believe...In Holiday Magic"

We remind you one more time and all we say at the end is remember the caring, the sharing and then we send you back. We picked a grandmother’s voice - I got accused of that being Grandmother Willow. No it’s not, she's an 86 year old grandmother that we picked up off voice demo tapes. She walked in. She brought her 60 year old son and she was wonderful. We talked her through it. She just reminded a lot of people of their grandmother. It was just a different kind of approach to that. We tried different voices too.