Miracle of Christmas - Live On Stage

Miracle of Christmas stages the nativity at the scale of a large-house musical, following Mary and Joseph from an ordinary betrothal in a small town to a birth in a stable with the wrong people watching. The angel arrives early. Almost nothing after that goes to anyone's plan.

The story runs from the annunciation through the journey, the shepherds and the wise men, and it fills in the ordinary hours around the famous moments: a young woman explaining herself to a fiance who does not believe her, a carpenter deciding what to do about it, a census that puts a heavily pregnant woman on a road she should not be travelling. Familiar carols and original songs carry it, and the company is large.

The production is built for spectacle. Sets rise and turn on more than one side of the audience, live animals appear on stage, and weather effects put snow and rain into the room. It is a straightforward telling with no revisionism in it, and the ambition is in the scale rather than the interpretation: a story most of the audience already knows, staged as though nobody has heard it.