YOUTH SHALL BE SERVED : Sharon, Lois & Bram Hold the Age of Innocents as Special

When Lois Lilienstein of the children’s trio Sharon, Lois & Bram first stepped onstage at age 5, she was in no hurry to set the world on fire.

“I be back,” she announced, warily eyeing the crowd, “when I be 6.”

As it turns out, even at that tender age, Lilienstein had formulated what would become a significant theme in her adult career: There’s no sense rushing a good thing. Especially childhood.

Lilienstein, with partners Sharon Hampson and Bram Morrison, has spent more than 16 years expressing that thought in the trio’s recordings, concerts and long-running “Elephant Show,” now in reruns on Nickelodeon. The group, which last week released its 13th recording, “All the Fun You Can Sing!,” brings a stage show of the same name to the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Sunday at 2:30 p.m.

The concert is one of three performances by name artists presented at OCPAC as part of the 1994 Imagination Celebration (Loretta Livingston and Dancers stage “The Grandma Moses Project” at the center April 27, and children’s pop group Parachute Express performs there May 1). Imagination Celebration, a nationwide arts-awareness program begun by the Kennedy Center in Washington, is hosted locally by the center and the Orange County Department of Education and continues through May 1 with free or low-cost performances, exhibits and workshops by arts and community groups at sites across the county.

In contrast with many cohorts in the burgeoning children’s music field, Sharon, Lois & Bram are old-fashioned. Banjos and slide whistles are heard more often than electric guitars in their mostly folk-inspired tunes. And, although Bram sports a salt-and-pepper beard, the trio’s onstage look is more conservative than that of its hipper counterparts.

But Lilienstein makes no apologies for the group’s choices, musically or sartorially.

“We don’t do rap and hip-hop,” she explained recently in a phone interview from her Toronto home. “It’s just not us. We like the creative flow of folk songs because it allows children to make up their own rhythms, or words or movements. It’s unique because it’s unfixed, fluid, and it gets across the message to children that the music they make is as valid as what the guy or gal sitting next to them makes.”

Last year, Sharon, Lois & Bram ended a long distribution and licensing deal with A&M; Records to sign with Drive Entertainment, a Los Angeles-based independent that released their holiday album “Candles, Snow and Mistletoe” and “All the Fun You Can Sing!” If plans pan out, Drive will help bring the trio solidly into the ‘90s with an interactive CD-ROM project.

Nonetheless, Lilienstein stresses that the group has no intention of abandoning its folkie roots for the kiddie-rock bandwagon, even if ignoring the trend means the trio appeals to a smaller audience.

“We can’t be all things to all people,” she said. “We can do some current stuff, but we’ll always remain true to our main purpose, to use our music, our talents, in the service of our children. In the past, (our music) might have appealed all the way to age 10,” she continued, a tad wistfully. “But there’s such pressure now on even 5- or 6-year-olds to do away with childish things. There’s a precious commodity called childhood, and I think that it stops sooner than it needs to.

“Besides,” she added with a laugh, “the three of us are the grand mammies and granddaddy (of children’s music) . . . we are what we are.”

Sharon, Lois & Bram are now in their 50s; Bram is a grandfather (his grandchild refers to the trio as “Sharon, Lois and Papa”).

In 1976, with a borrowed $20,000 bankroll, the threesome formed their own label and produced their first album, the bilingual “One Elephant, Deux Elephants” (their mascot, Elephant--actually the woman who choreographs their stage moves--made her debut when “One Elephant Came Out to Play,” a song from that album, was first performed in concert, and has stuck around ever since).

Lilienstein says the group has rebuffed offers to sign with other major labels and continues to record on the Toronto-based Elephant Records, using first A&M;, and now Drive, as U.S. licensees.

“We’re too old to have people tell us what to do,” she said with a rueful chuckle. “There have been attempts to ‘do a job on us,’ but as artists, controlling our own destiny is the bottom line.”

More than 3 million Sharon, Lois & Bram recordings have been sold in North America, and the group has released four videos, four songbooks and toured extensively in the United States and Canada. Their television program, “Elephant Show,” produced from 1984 to 1988, is rerun locally on Nickelodeon weekday mornings. The trio has been national ambassadors for UNICEF since 1988 and is active in the nonprofit Food Research and Action Center, which fights child hunger in the United States.

Lilienstein, a Chicago transplant who has a background in jazz and classical piano, met Hampson, a folk singer, through Toronto’s Mariposa Folk Festival, for which she established the first children’s music category. She came to know Morrison, also an established folkie in the Toronto area, through a preschool music program she set up when her son was starting school.

“Eclectic” is the word Lilienstein uses most often when describing the trio’s sound.

“I think our style is eclectic because that’s what our taste is,” she explained. “In our music, we bring to bear all the years we spent before we became a threesome, primarily the work we did with children.

“We all have folk music in common, but when I grew up, I didn’t much care for it,” she admitted, recalling how her father, an insurance salesman who moonlighted as a pianist for bar mitzvahs and parties, sparked her interest in pop, jazz and musical theater.

The “All the Fun You Can Sing!” album reflects the group’s varying tastes.

In “A Biscuit,” Hampson and Lilienstein produce sweet, Andrews Sisters-style harmonies to big-band instrumentals. The children’s standard “Peanut Butter and Jelly,” which must show up on at least half of all children’s recordings, is given a cool, jazzy spin that brings to mind a ‘60s coffeehouse.

With December’s release of “Candles, Snow and Mistletoe,” Sharon, Lois & Bram premiered a new project that was a definite departure from their usual recordings and concert tours: a three-part package that included the recording, as well as a video created from an original, live stage show that the group presented in New York’s Palace Theatre. A spokesman for the group said the show was well-received by audiences, despite slower-than-anticipated ticket sales, brought on largely, he said, by the show’s Dec. 26 opening and generally sluggish sales for family shows on Broadway during last year’s holiday season.

“Looking back on it, to have the temerity to put a show together for the Palace in four months is as mad a project as could be,” said Lilienstein, who added that the musical harks back to the Hollywood spectaculars of the 1940s and ‘50s. “We had a story, a 14-piece orchestra; we danced, and we sang. Wasn’t it a time!”

The group hopes to make “Candles” an annual event, bringing it to one or more selected cities each holiday season. The televised version is expected to air in December.

Sharon, Lois & Bram’s musical mix also includes a category that Lilienstein says reflects the “playground culture” of children, including everything from jump rope ditties to camp songs.

“Children have music of their own to give back to us,” she said, “to remind grown-ups of when we were young. Maybe it’s a tenuous thing, given the pressures of pop culture, but it’s lovely,” she said, her voice trailing off for a moment. “Basically, we subscribe to Woody Guthrie’s idea, which is a children’s song is any song that children like to sing.”

What: Sharon, Lois & Bram in “All the Fun You Can Sing!”

When: Sunday, April 24, at 2:30 p.m.

Where: Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive.

Whereabouts: From the San Diego (405) Freeway, exit at Bristol Street and drive north. Turn right on Town Center Drive.

Wherewithal: Tickets are $4 for children and adults and can be bought in person at the box office or by phone from TicketMaster. Advance purchase is recommended.

Where to call: (714) 556-2787, Ext. 888 (box office) or (714) 740-2000 (TicketMaster)

MORE KID STUFF

IN LAGUNA BEACH: ‘PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH’

A small investment of time and imagination pays off big for Milo in “The Phantom Tollbooth.” The Laguna Playhouse Youth Theatre presents the children’s fantasy April 22 through May 1 at the Moulton Theatre, 606 Laguna Canyon Road. $6 to $9. Call (714) 494-8021.

IN DANA POINT: A GOOD SONG OF THE SEA

Connecticut’s Forebitter, acclaimed performers of seaworthy songs and stories, teams with local storyteller Ed Dobyns to present music and yarns Saturday, April 23, at 7:30 p.m. at the Dana Point Youth Group Facility, 34451 Ensenada Place. $7 to $11. Call (714) 496-2274.

IN COSTA MESA: TRIBES GATHERING

On Saturday and Sunday, April 23-24, the Laguna Pueblo, Sioux, Apache and Navajo tribes share the music, dance and crafts of their ancestors at Orange Coast College, 2701 Fairview Road. $1 or canned food for the Southern California Indian Center. (714) 432-5817.

* CHILDREN’S LISTING, Page 24

ABOUT THE CELEBRATION

* This year’s Imagination Celebration can best be described as a buffet of the arts. Hosted by the Orange County Performing Arts Center and the Orange County Department of Education, the 10-day family event (from Saturday through May 1 after preview events last Saturday) involves more than 50 arts and community organizations, including South Coast Repertory, the Pacific Symphony, the Orange County Marine Institute and the Children’s Museum at La Habra. There’s plenty to go around, and a great deal of it is free. A full menu appears on Page 8. Dig in.