Of course there were lots of songs backed up by the great orchestra. One of the songs we recognized immediately. It was The Wind Is A Lion, that Mom and Dad had played on their violins. At one point in the musical, a boy on stage yelled, “The battalion’s home!” At that moment, a group of men had lined up in the back of the theater un-noticed by the audience. They began singing loudly, “It’s so good to be home again!” They marched though the aisles and came to the stage. The scene sent shivers up and down my spine. And I’m sure a tear or two was shed by the audience. The stage depiction of the crickets almost destroying the first years’ harvest and the pioneers being rescued by the seagulls eating up the crickets, was stunning. For this scene the semi-transparent screen descended again and vast swarms of crickets were shown by the movie projector. I don’t think I have seen so much emotion on stage as I did from those actors as they swatted the crickets. And then as they all knelt to pray and thank the Lord for sending the seagulls to save them.
At the end we thrilled to see and hear all the cast sing, “For This Is Our Promised Valley!” I realized then that we lived in that same promised valley!.
After that, we saw Promised Valley a lot. Some summers we went as many as five times to see it. And if anyone was visiting from out of town, we took them a long. One summer, each time we went, we noticed that one man sat on the very front row and laughed heartily at every joke. The next time that summer, and every time we went that summer, that same man was there and laughed just as loud and heartily at the jokes. It must have been a nightly ritual for him to go to the performance.
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