About Last Night

“Now Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home.”

G.K. Chesterton, The Thing

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review three webcast productions of A Christmas Carol and a webcast of The Steadfast Tin Soldier. Here’s an excerpt.

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Stage versions of “A Christmas Carol” are the “Nutcrackers” of a growing number of American theaters, sure-fire annual cash cows that are both good shows and safe ones—not only because Charles Dickens’s parable of the power of grace is universally known and beloved in the English-speaking world, but also because it evokes the Christmas spirit while steering clear of outright religiosity…

Many of the best “Christmas Carols” I’ve seen this season are one-man shows, of which the most spectacular by far is Jefferson Mays’s version. One of America’s leading stage actors, Mr. Mays is renowned for playing multiple characters in the same show (he portrayed some 40-odd men, women and nonbinary types in Doug Wright’s “I Am My Own Wife”). His fully staged solo version of “A Christmas Carol,” which first ran at Los Angeles’s Geffen Playhouse in 2018 and was headed for Broadway when the pandemic shut it down, is a tour de force of a similar kind, one in which Mr. Mays performs, so far as I could tell, the complete text of Dickens’s novella, turning himself into one character after another with supreme ingenuity….

If you favor a less elaborate, more intimate staging, then I strongly recommend Writers Theatre’s version, in which Michael Halberstam, the company’s artistic director, gives a dramatic small-stage solo reading of “A Christmas Carol” (he carries the book throughout) directed to exceptionally fine effect by Stanton Long. It’s not in any way static—this is a real show, not a lectern reading….

Houston’s Alley Theatre has mounted a Zoom-based version adapted by Doris Baizley and very well directed by Brandon Weinbrenner in which 10 members of the Alley’s resident acting company, all performing from their individual living rooms, divvy up the parts, with David Rainey giving a splendidly pungent, even salty performance as Scrooge….

For those humbuggers who don’t want to see anybody’s “Christmas Carol,” the place to go is Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre, which is streaming Mary Zimmerman’s near-wordless pantomime version of “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale about a tin soldier who loves a paper ballerina. Not since George Balanchine’s 1975 ballet version have I seen a “Steadfast Tin Soldier” of comparable quality….

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Read the whole thing here.

A scene from Jefferson Mays’ performance of A Christmas Carol:

Mel Tormé sings “Moonlight in Vermont” on TV in 1967. The pianist is Stan Kenton:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“This is a pleasant surprise, Archie. I would not have beieved it. That of course is the advantage of being a pessimist; a pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises, an optimist nothing but unpleasant.”

Rex Stout, Fer-de-Lance

In today’s Wall Street Journal I chronicle the best theater of 2020—all of it in the form of streaming webcasts. Here’s an excerpt.

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The last time I went to a theater was in early March, when I reviewed the off-Broadway premiere of Katori Hall’s “The Hot Wing King.” Like everybody else in the civilized world, I was well aware of the Covid-19 pandemic, but it had never occurred to me that a week later all the theaters in New York would be locked up tight and I would be confined to my Manhattan apartment until further notice. No sooner was the lockdown order issued, though, than I realized that I’d need either to discontinue my weekly drama column or approach it in a radically different way.

Within a week, the solution had become clear to me. San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater and Syracuse Stage, located in upstate New York, announced that they would be streaming broadcast-quality videos of stage productions that were already in previews at the time of the lockdown. Several other regional theater companies followed suit, and I thought—perhaps I should say hoped—that more such webcasts would soon fill the electronic pipeline. Sure enough, regional companies of all kinds started putting their shows online….

I believe that webcasting is destined to become a permanent part of the ecology of regional theater. Why? Because it will be a long time before playgoers, especially older ones, feel safe going to the theater again. If that’s right, then it’s nothing short of irresponsible for regional theaters of all sizes not to put their work on the web….

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Read the whole thing here.

“To assert dignity is to lose it.”

Rex Stout, The League of Frightened Men

“We’re Despicable,” written by Jule Styne and Bob Merrill for the soundtrack of Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol, originally telecast by NBC in 1962:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“There is nothing like infantilism for keeping the eyes bright and the skin smooth.”

Rebecca West, The New Meaning of Treason