by composer Angela Rice
ComposeArts proudly presents the World-Premiere production of The Royal Red Bird touring the elementary schools throughout the Commonwealth in Spring 2025!
This magical and musical production will feature an exciting blend of singers, puppeteers, and dancers (from the Lexington Ballet). Interactive and fun, The Royal Red Bird provides opportunities for some students to join in the fun as part of the performance!
Children in Kindergarten through 5th grade will enjoy this 35-minute musical followed by a question-and-answer session.
In the mysterious and beautiful Birdland, the Royal Red Bird watches over all of the songs that birds sing all day long. One day, disaster strikes, and Henry–a helpful human–saves the Royal Red Bird. This act of kindness ripples throughout the natural world. Years later, when one of Henry's grandchildren falls ill, all the birds in the world race against time to find a cure, proving that one small act of kindness can change the world.
This important new work by Angela Rice and inspired by the illustrations of Lindsey Kiser celebrates kindness, working together, and the beauty of the natural world.
About the Musical
Fully staged and costumed musical for kids. Interactive where audience members can take part in the show!
Book a Show at Your School
Bookings are available from February 3 - February 28, 2025
$950 for One Show (35 minutes) and Q&A
$1,500 for Two Shows at the Same School
(Ask about our multi show discounts and opportunities for sponsorship through private donors and Agricultural Extension Offices)
From the Director
Of all the living creatures, great and small, none elicit a mixture of delight and wonder quite like birds: the dancers of the sky. Artists and architects, scientists and scholars, cast their eyes heavenward with envy and awe, and with the hope of borrowing just a bit of their avian magic for everything from sonnets to spacecraft.
Angela Rice isn't the first musician to create a composition inspired by birds, but surely her work must be among the most beautiful of its kind. She has translated her obvious love of the natural world into a unique fantasia, filled with a spectacular complement of our fine, feathered friends of every size, shape, color, and character. Her music does what birds do: it flits and flies, swoops and swoons. And in its final, climatic moments, it soars.
Today's performance asks you, this piece's first-ever audience, to cast your own eyes skyward and employ your imagination toward what this production will one day be. Months from now, The Royal Red Bird will embark on a touring premiere, fully outfitted with costumes, puppets, props, and sets. The visual presentation will be as colorful as the many birds that appear, and as imaginative as the story that brings them all together. Today, you are treated to a glimpse of the first moments of the collaborative process and to hear the first stirrings of an important new work.
We invite you, every now and then, to close your eyes as you listen and imagine the mountains, the sea, and the air. Imagine the sky filled with birds of every kind, and share the fond astonishment of Henry, the kind man who discovers that a small act of compassion can inspire a lifetime of friendship. And adventure.
Meet the Artistic Team
Bo List (Director)
Bo List is an award-winning educator, playwright, and theatre director – born and raised in Lexington, KY, and educated and experienced throughout the United State before returning to the Bluegrass. He proudly holds a BA in Theatre and an MFA in Theatre Directing from the University of Kentucky and University of Memphis Departments of Theatre and Dance, respectively. Bo currently serves as Director of Development for Leeds Center for the Arts in Winchester, KY, and on the adjunct theater faculty of Transylvania University. He is also Co-chair of the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts Drama program, which provides intensive college preparation for advanced high school theatre students. He also serves as a member of the Board of Trustees for the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. He recently completed an 8-year tenure as Producing Artistic Director of AthensWest Theatre Company, as well as 9 years as Director of Theatre for Sayre School, where he was honored by the school’s Board and Short awards, as well as by the National Society of Arts and Letters as Kentucky Arts Educator of the Year in 2019. As playwright, Bo’s adaptation of Frankenstein is published by Dramatic Play Publishing and has been produced across the country (and New Zealand!) in professional, community, and academic theatres. Spring 2025 will see the premieres of two of his plays; his adaptation of Karel Capek’s R.U.R. will enjoy a month-long run with Chicago’s City Lit Theatre Company, and his commissioned play Ghost Music will run at Transylvania University. His play Ladies of Liberty recently finished a run at Studio Players in Lexington, KY, and his one-act Canary Yellow won the Father Hamblin Award for Playwriting from Abingdon Theatre Company in New York City. Other plays include The Last Dracula (premiere: Edinburgh Festival Fringe, 2007), Bubbly (staged reading: Abingdon Theatre Company; premiere with Balagula Theatre, Lexington KY), Oh, the Humanities! (Kentucky Conservatory Theatre 24- hour Theatre Project), Still Romeo After All These Years (premiere: Cypress Productions) and I Left My Heart in Kissimmee (premiere: Bluegrass Community and Technical College). Bo is a frequent collaborator with the Kentucky Humanities Council, creating dramatic presentations of the lives of significant Kentuckians – including Mary Todd Lincoln, Daniel Boone, Jefferson Davis, Nancy Green (the original Aunt Jemima), Henry Clay, and (younger, pre-Civil War) Abraham Lincoln.
Tom Willis (Set Designer)
Tom Willis is a stage designer from Central Kentucky. He is the resident lighting designer for Leeds Theatre in Winchester and frequently designs for Transylvania University Theater and Sayre School. Memorable designs include UK Opera Theatre’s Silent Night, On The Verge's A DOLL’S HOUSE, PART 2, Athens West Theatre Company's 33 VARIATIONS and TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. He holds a BA in Drama from the University of Kentucky, College of Fine Arts. Willisdesigns.net
Karen Loeffler (Puppeteer and Costume Designer)
Karen Loeffler is a native Lexington artist who has been making and designing costumes, props, and puppets for over 30 years. She has worked with local theaters including Athen’s West, Woodford Theatre, and Voices Amplified. Her puppet and costume creations have also been featured in productions in Connecticut, New York and Indiana. Karen comes from a long tradition of sewing and fiber artists, learning to sew from her mother and grandmothers. She attended the University of Kentucky, where she earned a BA in Art Studio with an emphasis in painting and weaving. She began designing and constructing costumes at her mother’s costume shop in Lexington in the 1980’s, adding prop and puppet design after her children became involved in theatre. She finds puppet design particularly interesting, as it allows her to use a wide set of skills. Creating manipulatable mixed media sculptures that are also collaborative pieces, influenced as much by the puppeteer’s choices as by her design, is as rewarding as it is challenging. Karen credits any abilities she has to her wildly creative, supportive family and her father’s innate sense of curiosity about how things work and desire to figure it out.