- December 10, 2025
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Many theatrical productions claim to bring history to life, but few do it with accuracy and authenticity. Fictionalized history is often sexier than real life and doesn’t require painstaking research. Of course, in some cases, source material doesn’t even exist.
The words of real people help make Peter Rothstein’s “All Is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914” a true Christmas miracle. Rothstein combed museums and archives in Europe to find the documentation to let English, French and German soldiers and officials tell the story.
Contrary to popular belief, not everything is on the internet, and AI can’t yet be harnessed for this kind of in-the-trenches historical research.
Rothstein weaves excerpts from letters, diaries and official military memoranda with holiday carols and upbeat ditties of the day (“Pack up your troubles in your old kit pack”) to depict an heartwarming episode that might otherwise have been lost to the annals of history.
“A lot of people don’t know about the Christmas Truce,” Rothstein said during a dinner break from rehearsing “All is Calm,” which he wrote in 2007 and is directing for the second time at Asolo Repertory Theatre, where he is producing artistic director.
“The powers that be wanted the story squashed,” Rothstein continued. “The last thing the propaganda machine wanted was for people to know that Tommy and Fritz were making friends. The Christmas Truce was denied its place in history.”
Rothstein first learned about the little-known event through a 1984 song by folk singer John McCutcheon called “Christmas in the Trenches.” “I thought it was a lovely piece of hippie fiction,” he says.
A master of the hammered dulcimer, McCutcheon is an alumni of St. John’s University, a private Catholic men’s college in Minnesota that Rothstein also attended.
Rothstein is such a fan of McCutcheon’s work that he sang “Alleluia, The Great Storm Is Over,” at his father’s funeral.
When he was formulating the idea for a show about the Christmas Truce, Rothstein discovered Stanley Weintraub’s 2001 book, “Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce.”
This book provides excellent background on how troops on both sides of the lines stopped fighting on Christmas Eve 1914. Instead, they celebrated Christ’s birth by singing carols, exchanging gifts, playing football and burying their dead.
To hear Rothstein tell it, the Christmas Truce occurred because of music, which he says was a big part of life in the trenches where warfare took place in World War I.
“The Christmas Truce wouldn’t have happened without music,” Rothstein says. “Music is an international language. When the other side literally called for an encore, it became the language of trust."
Originally written for the Cantus men’s chorus in Minneapolis, “All is Calm” contains no less than 30 songs. They are sung a capella by the nine performers in the show. They are Sasha Andreev, Phinehas Bynum, Daniel Greco, Bradley Greenwald, Thomas McNichols, Riley McNutt, Rodolfo Nieto, Andrew Wilkowske and Evan Tyler Wilson. Greenwald and McNichols are making their Asolo debut. The actor/singers use coats, hats and props to play soldiers from more than one country.
In addition to English carols such as “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” and “The First Noel,” there are German songs such as “O, Tannenbaum,” “Stille Nacht” (“Silent Night”) and “Es ist ein Ros entsprungen,” commonly known in English as “Lo, how a rose e’er blooming.”
French is heard in “Angels We Have Heard On High.” Instantly recognizable to all is the Scottish song “Auld Lang Syne,” traditionally sung on New Year’s Eve to bid the old year farewell.
Before Rothstein arrived at Asolo Rep in 2023 and “All Is Calm” was first produced in The Ringling’s Historic Asolo Theater last year through a partnership between Rothstein and The Ringling’s Currie-Kohlmann curator of performance, Elizabeth Doud, it had a life of its own.
First produced as a radio show by Cantus vocal ensemble and Rothstein’s Theater Latté Da in Minneapolis, “All Is Calm” premiered on Minnesota Public Radio in 2007.
“The world premiere was live on the radio,” Rothstein recalled. “We never did a preview. We just had three actors and a vocal ensemble. Cantus toured it for nine years.”
Over the years, “All Is Calm” has evolved from a bare-bones musical performance into a fully formed theatrical production. “We found a way for it to have a theatrical life,” Rothstein says. “The press liked it and audiences wanted to talk about it, so we went about expanding it.”
With the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I in 2014, museums put together programs that allowed Rothstein to flesh out “All is Calm” with more historical detail. He has traveled to Europe twice to gather material.
In 2018, Laura Little produced “All is Calm” Off Broadway, where it won a Drama Desk Award, as well as a touring production. She also served as executive producer of the TV program on PBS.
The fine-tuning and tweaking of “All is Calm” continued when Asolo Rep first produced the show in the jewelbox Historic Asolo Theater in 2024. Greg Emetaz’s projection design creates the world of war.
“All is Calm” begins in England, and in English, following the young conscripts as they head off to fight for king and country, confident that they’ll be home for Christmas. German and French songs aren’t sung until the action moves to the trenches on the Continent.
The 65-minute show has no intermission. It is divided into segments with distinct shifts in mood. After “The Optimistic Departure,” we face “The Grim Reality.” Then comes “Christmas” and the joy of “The Truce,” when the troops turn “No Man’s Land into Everyman’s Land,” as one character notes.
The happiness is short-lived, though. It ends with “The Return to Battle,” followed by an epilogue featuring three grainy images of soldiers involved in the truce, the only ones in existence, says Rothstein.
“All is Calm” is available for licensing and has been taken up with gusto by Shakespeare and opera companies across the country. Among them are Hudson Valley Shakespeare, San Diego Opera and Orlando Opera, which is producing the show this season.
“The story resonates with audiences,” Rothstein says. “One time, a man brought a pickelhelm, the spiked metal helmet German soldiers wore during World War I, to one of the shows.”
Like the other show Rothstein is directing at Asolo Rep this season, the 9/11 tale “Come From Away,” “All is Calm” shines a light on humanity in the darkest of times, Rothstein says.
When Rothstein and his artistic associates first performed “All Is Calm” in 2007, they thought it would consist of three shows on the radio. Eighteen years later, it’s becoming an holiday tradition in Sarasota.
