Sharon, Lois and Bram’s ‘Great Big’ Ideas for Future : Children’s music: The Canadian trio is seeking a higher U.S. profile with a new recording contract and tour.

Sharon, Lois and Bram, along with fellow Canadians Raffi and Fred Penner, were the superstars of children’s music in the ‘70s and ‘80s in the United States and Canada. As children’s music has boomed in this country and more recordings vie for shelf space, however, the trio’s albums have faded from view.

Today, although their award-winning recordings have gone platinum and double platinum in Canada, most children here know the first-name-only, fiftysomething performers primarily from reruns of their old Canadian “Elephant Show” series, now a top-rated Nick Jr. offering on the Nickelodeon channel. The most recent episodes of the series are 5 years old.

“We’re delighted it continues to run and has an audience,” Sharon said during a conference call from Bram’s Toronto home (Lois was in rehearsal), “but every artist likes their newest output out there.”

To that end, the three performers are singing a brand-new tune these days and making some ambitious, high-profile moves.

Along with a live band and their mascot, a plush, dancing elephant, they have been on a whirlwind “Great Big Tour,” which wraps up stateside with two family concerts Saturday at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts.

They are starring in an hourlong TV holiday special produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. and Lorne Michaels’ Broadway Video. It is set to air in Canada in December, with U.S. distribution and a home video likely in 1994.

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This August, they were in L.A. recording “Candles, Snow & Mistletoe,” a groundbreaking album for them in both content and conception: Produced and arranged by Emmy winner Glen Roven, it is fully orchestrated, not folksy. It is their first holiday album and it includes original material commissioned for the recording, another first for the group.

Among the new songs, by Roven and “Sesame Street” writer Mark Saltzman, are “a novel approach to ‘Rudolph’ and ‘Twelve Days of Christmas,’ ” a Hanukkah song and lyrics for “Nutcracker Suite” selections.

“This album has very much more a Broadway kind of orchestration and feel to it than anything we’ve done before,” Bram said.

The last new item on the group’s ambitious agenda this year is indeed nothing less than a Broadway gig--a week’s run at the Palace Theatre at the end of December. It is not a concert, but an original musical theater production based on the “Candles” album that the trio hopes to tour in the future as a “perennial” holiday offering.

“It’s a big stretch for us,” Sharon said, “scary, but also exciting.”

The trio, which has been around “going on 16 years,” began a career rejuvenation with its departure this year from A&M; Records, their U.S. label, for Drive Entertainment, a new, L.A.-based independent company.

“We were looking for a label,” Sharon said, “that is committed to you, that believes strongly in the potential for your product. People who decide to get into the business have to understand it is a building process to develop the market. If they are prepared to invest the time, the payoff will be there.”

“Right now the efficiency of our (U.S.) distribution is low,” said Stephen McNie, marketing director for the trio’s Toronto company, Elephant Records, “because for the most part we’ve been treated as a pop act in pop marketing terms.

“The bottom line is we have to do a much better job in America of making parents aware that this wonderful (repertoire of music) exists.”

Stephen Powers, Drive’s CEO, said his company will concentrate solely on Sharon, Lois and Bram “for the first year. They’re really beginning to hit their stride and the upside is huge for them,” he said. “I think they’re just going up, up, up.” Drive will eventually re-release the group’s entire 11-album catalogue.

Wherever the trio goes, however, it doesn’t plan to change what has been its motivation “from day one,” Sharon said. “We love music, and we hope that we can introduce it to children and their families in ways that allow them to experience it as a source of great pleasure in their lives.”