'Tis the season to be jolly -- just ask any of the island's legion of English teachers. Far from being a celebration of the birth of Jesus, Christmas is an easy lesson plan; enough to get young kids through the entire month of December learning useful words like "reindeer" and "savior." Thousands of elementary school students are duly dressed up and paraded onto nativity scenes to carol for their camcorder-toting parents.
But one group of English teachers have forgone directing their students in a Christmas pageant and are instead touring the island to perform one of their own, entitled Joy to the World.
The cast of teachers, directed by Swiss national Beat Eisele, come from Taichung, Taipei, Yangmei and Tainan. They've been meeting in Neihu on weekends for the past couple of months to put together a Christmas pageant to top all the rest. The result is a three-part show that starts with a parable about honesty, taken from one of the Scarecrow and Friends series of books published by Kaiser Kastle, who is sponsoring the show.
"Kaiser Kastle is putting up a lot of money for the show and so we have to promote something, somehow," Eisele said of the first part of the show. The second vignette is the classic, Jack and the Beanstalk. "It's more interactive as the narrator is always talking with the kids and adults in the audience to get them involved in the show ? asking what will happen next and so on. It's really a good time. We've had great responses from audiences in Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung."
The production finally gets to the requisite "better to give than receive" Christmastime theme in the last part, a reworking of the classic Hans Christian Andersen story, The Little Matchgirl, in which the impoverished matchseller gets to live the comfortable life she envisions while burning her inventory, instead of ending up dead on the frozen ground.
"We wanted a happy ending to the story," Eisele said. "It's Christmas after all."
A the end of each performance, Kaiser Kastle will donate 200 VCDs of the performance to 100 private and public kindergartens.
Having already performed for audiences in Taichung, Kaohsiung and Tainan, the group performs in Ilan tonight before coming to Taipei tomorrow, Saturday, Dec. 14, and finally at Taoyuan on Sunday, Dec. 15. Their Ilan performance will be held at Luodong Elementary School. Performances in Taipei will take place at City Hall's family theater (台北市政府親子劇場). Taoyuan's performance will be held at Chungyang University (中央大學). Tickets for all shows cost NT$150 for kids and NT$300 for adults and are available at the door.
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