A Very Merry Minneti Christmas Carol...

A remarkable, rare, and practically a command performance of the Charles Dickens classic holiday play, A Christmas Carol, was presented as an interactive, live show on Sunday, December 20, at The CATHE community center in Burlington, Wisconsin. How do I know...because I was there tending to the spotlights for the performance. My sister, Lori, was in the cast performing a series of characters, including Tiny Tim and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, while also engaging the audience in this refreshing English Music Style of presenting a play.

This version, A Dickens of a Christmas Carol, presented by the Wisconsin Actors Ensemble, worked with the script actually used by Charles Dickens during personal performances on stage 170 years ago.

At times Lori had to "coach" someone in the audience who had a script sheet and was wearing props like a top hat or a dog's nose to get their lines right. At other times she would bring the play to the audience by selecting one or more to dance with her! 

In this version, there was a member of the cast, Ted Tyson, whose job it was to coach the audience, letting them know with signs and objects, like a match box when the audience was supposed to scrunch plastic pieces together to simulate the crackling of a log fireplace. He also played a small keyboard adding silent-film like organ music to various scenes.

The anchor of the remarkable performance was the versatile, talented and experienced actor, Jimmy Iaquinta, who in the Charles Dickens style, held a manuscript of the play and by switching hats and scarfs and vocal inflection, somehow managed to play three or more characters, including Scrooge and Bob Cratchit.

Manning the spotlights, I couldn't help but focus in on my sister and marveled at her professional determination to put on the very best performance possible no matter who was in the audience, from royalty to commoner and everyone in between. There were no songs to be sung by Lori, but her acting voice is so lyrical and styled that what comes out of her mouth has the quality and impact of singing. 

Her extreme range of projecting emotion and switching accents was also on full display from the sad scenes of Tiny Tim's illness to the enthusiasm of the street boy charged by a renewed Scrooge to go and buy a big fat goose for Christmas day dinner!

 

I suspect most actors, but especially for those in this acting troupe, you could tell they were performing in honor of their art form, joyously inhabiting the characters, and yes hopefully entertaining an audience, but even more to revel in the creative, artistic expression they thrive on during performances.

When the curtain finally came down and the actors took their well-deserved bows, instead of feeling drained and scurrying off to some private place to recharge drained batteries, they enthusiastically engaged with audience members, answering questions and switching characters once again to continue the "performance" with the mundane unscripted conversations of old and newfound friends.

 

It was all something to behold, especially from my perch in the balcony manning the spotlights, but when I finally came down to join the party after the performance, I was in something of a daze at having been a small part of a remarkable and inspiring theatrical event. There might not have been ten thousand people there, or a queen, or a famous celebrity, yet the Universe Smiled just the same and the world was enriched by the gift of their performance.