from On A Summer’s Night (aka Oberon)
Music & Lyrics by Jim Betts
Sung in the show by OBERON
Sung here by Jim Betts
Arrangement by Stephen Woodjetts

I have always believed
That for everything beautiful
There is a star in the sky
And that the brighter the star
The more beautiful the one thing that it shines for.
And that whenever what is beautiful should die
Another star will fall from out the sky
And I’ve wondered as they fall
Will there soon be no more stars left at all?
With each tree that comes down
With each lost line of poetry
And star disappears.
With every passion that fades,
Every legend that’s belittled or forgotten.
And will the last remaining starlight soon be gone
And will anyone remember what once shone
Unless I
Can put some stars back in the sky?

“Starlight” was written for the 1979 Charlottetown Festival production of On A Summer’s Night, a musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s DreamOn A Summer’s Night was subsequently produced at Hart House (University Of Toronto) by The Group Of Several in 1985, and then adapted again as Oberon, and produced at Sheridan College in 2010. (There is a studio demo recording of the songs from that version that is available here if you’re interested.)

The song “Starlight” has its beginnings in two shows I worked on with the New Faces company at New College, University Of Toronto, in the 1970’s. I wrote an early version of On A Summer’s Night for New Faces in 1975. It didn’t bear much resemblance to the show we eventually did at The Charlottetown Festival, but some of the songs from the early show did survive. The “Starlight” song had its roots not in that show, however, but in the 1976 New Faces show The Last Night Of Starlight. The title song from that show was sung by a young Mag Ruffman.

When I was rewriting On A Summer’s Night for Charlottetown, I had a place in the show for a song like “The Last Night Of Starlight”, but it needed to have a slightly more positive slant. Stars died in “The Last Night Of Starlight”; in the new version that became “Starlight”, stars are born. In the current version of the show, now titled Oberon, it is sung by the title character as his “I want” song.  

“Starlight” has become one of my most performed songs, partly because it has been published as part of the Royal Conservatory’s Voice Repertoire Series and, as a result, is often performed at voice competitions and student concerts. It turns out there are a few YouTube versions out there