Peoria Times-Observer, Wednesday, August 2, 2006
BARNARD RETURNS HOME TO PRESENT “A FLOOD OF CREATURES” MUSICAL
The phrase, “I gone to come back” is used frequently in Barbados and writer-director Edith “Edie” Barnard now knows the true meaning.
“I used to hear that said all the time when I first moved there (to Barbados), and it sounded odd,” Barnard said. However upon returning to Peoria after several years outside the Midwest, Barnard realized the meaning of the phrase. “It’s a lot like the characters in (F. Scott) Fitzgerald’s novels, who let the Midwest and later returned….I feel like the last paragraph of “The Great Gatsby.”
Barnard, the daughter of a Methodist minister in Decatur, received her bachelor’s degree in music education from the University of Illinois. She later received her masters of music and theater from State University of New York in Binghamton.
In 1980, Barnard, who now lives in Peoria, was given a grant from the Maine Arts Commission while living in Bath, Maine, to write a “wholesome family musical.”
A few moths later, Barnard completed “A Flood of Creatures,” a musical about an old woman who is too busy cleaning her house to get a pet. She is then visited by a literal “flood of creatures,” including a dog who wants to be a cat and a cow who tells chicken jokes.
Since its completion, Barnard has directed the show more than 70 times in Maine, where she operated her own musical theatre for fifteen years, in New York, where she attended graduate school, in Pennsylvania, where she has friends, and in Barbados, where she lived for several years.
Barnard said she is happy to finally bring her musical to her home state.
Barnard’s directing process does not change with each production. She said she has the “gift to see possibility in everybody, and how to develop it.” Each incarnation of her musical does bring with it small changes, however.
For example, the Peoria production will feature the premiere of two new instruments to the pit orchestra, the bassoon and the oboe, played by members of the Peoria Symphony. The original pig was a Jungian analyst and played the musical saw. “I’ve had dobros, concertinas, violin, cello, viola, and in Barbadossmall steel pan band!”
The most surprising performance over the years, she said, took place in an arts center located in a big barn outside Scranton, Pa. “At all the right places” in the script, the weather outside turned and a thunderstorm took place.
Barnard has served as a cultural ambassador to Greece for the United States government. She tours a one-woman musical show based on the life of Harriet Beecher Stowe under the auspices of the Smithsonian. She performed this last January at the Pekin Library for their annual Martin Luther King breakfast, in Washington in May and has several upcoming performances in Central Illinois.
In 1986, she received an award from the White House for her musical, “Courtly Appeal,” which she wrote about the U. S. Constitution.
She is an executive speech coach and offers lessons in voice, acting, piano, dulcimer, guitar and confidence-building through the arts from her home in Peoria’s historic district. She also teaches “TeamBuilding” and “Conflict Resolution” at the Professional Development Institute at ICC.