Queen City Songs

All Aboard for Queen City Songs – a time travel song tour of Burlington leaving in 1949 when David Schein was born in the Fletcher hospital, on the hill above the town, ending now in 2026 and circling back to the site of the Abenaki people’s fishing camp below the Winooski falls – the future site of the Burlington Town Dump.

Schein leads the audience through Burlington streets and sites rooted in his memories – of what happened and what could have. The tour follows a map of Burlington from the South End to the New North End . Hot Spots and Song Sites include Adams School, BHS Cafeteria, Clark’s Woods, the Dump in the Intervale, the Barge Canal, The Loft Coffee House, St. Joseph’s Orphanage and Figgy’s basement – these are stops in a tour of Schein’s remembered and imagined Queen City. Themes are serious, funny, scathing, dark and nostalgic; Uncle Al’s Bomb-Shelter, the folks on the hill and the folks in the Miills, “Gentiles Only,” burning the trash, boy’s fighting culture, high school mating, the Light off the Lake, the raspberries – all to illuminate a sense of place; Burlington, in its complexity; what is lost, what is innate and what still “Scheins” through.

Queen City Songs is written, composed and performed by Schein with musician Ron Rost and directed by R.J. Bieganski, with whom Schein made theater for many years in Chicago.