Former Paradise Elementary to host holiday show
The intrepid explorers have finally reached Paradise.
Lewis and Clark’s famous expedition into the Western continent more than 200 years ago is the vehicle for the Montana ShamRockers’ holiday music, history and sketch show “Christmas with Lewis and Clark,” playing for one night only at the Paradise Center on Friday, Dec. 16, at 7 p.m.
The Center is the new name for the former Paradise Elementary School, which opened in 1910 but closed three years ago when the five-room schoolhouse was serving only five students.
Tickets to the show are $15 for adults and $5 for students, and will support the Paradise Elementary School Preservation Committee, a nonprofit group that has overseen the school’s transition into a community center, visitors’ center and performance space since July.
“We feel like our prime directive is to get people in the space so that’s what I’m trying to do,” committee member Karen Thorson said. “We’ve been so pleased to see it used so much, and we’ve been so pleased with the generosity of county residents.”
The schoolhouse sits on a hill overlooking the town, which once was a bustling railroad hub but now lists just 163 residents, as of the 2010 census.
“Paradise has diminished and this is what’s left,” Thorson added. “This beautiful school building, which is arguably one of the best-preserved and most attractive places in the country.”
The committee has converted the school’s gymnasium — built as an addition in the 1960s — into a roughly 2,400-square foot multi-purpose room that will be the setting for Friday’s performance. The group also plans on turning one of the classrooms into a small museum about the town and another into a visitor’s center for the thousands of travelers who pass through the tiny town on MT 200.
“Our interest is three-fold,” Thorson, a Plains resident, said. “We feel like anything that has historic value should be preserved … Secondly, we have a lot of friends in Paradise and that school is the sole remnant. It was important to them so it’s important to us. Third, we felt strongly that it would be important to have a publicly owned space that was good for the arts.”
The Center hosted its first act, the Japanese drumming group Fubuki Daiko, in October and drew more than 180 people.
THE SHAMROCKERS’ “Lewis and Clark” is a musical celebration of the two Christmases the explorers spent together during their journey, one in what is now Mandan, North Dakota (1804) and the other (1805) at Fort Clatsop in present-day Oregon.
The show is part history lesson and part variety show, with the Polson-based ShamRockers performing a number of period pieces that incorporate the ethnic diversity of the traveling party while sharing and reenacting some stories from the road.
“We’ve had people say ‘if history had been taught this way when I was in school I wouldn’t have flunked,’” Neal “Nialls” Lewing, one of the ShamRockers and the show’s creator, laughed.
“It’s based on history, we use some of their actual journal entries, some of their own words, some of their descriptions of things,” he continued. “But we have no idea. There’s no concrete evidence but from what we can gather we’ve uncovered some of the songs that they probably knew.”
The ShamRockers have been together since 2003 and have been performing the “Lewis and Clark” show for the last several years, although never before in Paradise. The group’s Irish lean — hence the name, ShamRockers — has sent the quartet as far away as Ireland to perform in their own unique style, which they describe as “acoustic, vocally-driven, with raucous fun and a touch of history.”
“Christmas with Lewis and Clark” begins at 7 p.m. Friday at the Paradise Center. Tickets are on sale now at www.sanderscountyarts.org and may be purchased at the door Friday.
For more information on the school preservation efforts, visit www.paradisecentermt.org.