When the turkey leftovers are nearly gone and the Black Friday sales have subsided, it’s that wonderful time of year when chia and shaver ads flood the airwaves. This is the time when good Charlotteans put up their holiday lights, catch up with their holiday shopping, and partake in all their holiday parties and entertainment — finishing a good week before Christmas actually arrives.
If you don’t have family dropping in annually to visit and celebrate, you can be consoled with a set of fictive visitations from familiar characters, none of them burdened with New Testament baggage. These are visitors from the worlds of Dickens, Capra, Sedaris, and Tuna, Texas. Occasional newcomers join the festival, while some of the familiars visit only at intervals.
The Yuletide mix is fairly typical for 2008, if a little conservative with the cancellation of Seven Santas premiere at Actor’s Theatre. Our first post-turkey weekend had one holdover from last year, Theatre Charlotte’s framed edition of A Christmas Carol and a reunion with the rowdy Herdmans of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, absent from the Children’s Theatre rotation since 2002. Something new? We had our first look at Sister’s Christmas Catechism, an inevitable spin-off spawned by Late Nite Catechism, a huge hit at Booth Playhouse — twice in the past two years.
Something blue? Surely you were paying attention when we spotlighted Ugly Coco in last week’s Loaf.
Scrooge and Miss Peru have exited over the weekend, but you can catch Sister’s Christmas Catechism: The Mystery of the Magi’s Gold through Sunday. Of course, if you come in with liquor on your breath, drape an arm around your spouse, chatter or pop chewing gum during the performance, have the audacity to bare your shoulders or knees, or (heaven forbid) harbor a cellphone that is blasting out its ringtone, Sister will very likely catch you — and exact a price. At the opening night’s performance, one hapless audience member had her cellphone confiscated. Sitting recklessly in the front row — truly perilous turf when facing Sister — UNC Charlotte provost Joan F. Lorden was obliged to cover her nether parts.
Nor did their punishments end there. After intermission, the cellphone miscreant was forced to don the costume of an ass for Sister’s forensic Christmas pageant. In the cruelest of ironies, the wanton Lorden was compelled to portray the Virgin Mary at the manger. Did you know the name of the VM’s dad? Lady who did got one of Sister’s saint cards, the baseball cards of the Catholic Church. Behave yourself, and you may find yourself with some servile task to perform on Sister’s behalf plus the coveted title of Class Brown-nose!
Yes, Christmas Cat is a rigorously Pavlovian experience, particularly if you grew up in that catechistic milieu. Sue and I often bring a Catholic school survivor along with us to local theater events, very useful for gauging the authenticity and intensity of these religious rites. So while you do sit in the front rows at your peril, our Carol testifies that Mary Zentmyer, the current Sister, isn’t nearly as terrifying as Kim Richards was last October in the Late Nite installment. Nonetheless, Carol admitted that, even from the far corner of the second row, she never presumed to make eye contact with Zentmyer all evening long. Sue was also considerably less traumatized. Back in 2007, she was so terrorized by Richards that she pleaded with me not to take notes. No paperwork, Sister had decreed while I parked the car. This time, Sue even let me borrow a pen.
That’s not to say that it’s completely safe to show up at Booth Playhouse without a few singles in your pocket, in case Sister fines you for a transgression. As for Sister’s sleuthing, ferreting out what happened to the Magi gold two millennia after the alleged heist, the crime scene investigation at the Nativity has a cheesiness that is fully consonant with the pageant wardrobe and those saint cards.
After seeing Christmas Catechism yourself, the truly wicked thing to do is send a friend — whose cellphone you dutifully call during the performance. The mills of the just God grind exceeding small if all goes according to plan. Deliciously, your friend will have his or her phone seized by Sister. Then you have the satisfaction of having Sister talk to you over the contraband phone in front of a live audience!
Truly, the joys of adulthood don’t compare with such childish triumphs. If they do, you may not be susceptible to all the fun of Sister and her petty piety.
The Herdmans are the terrors of the neighborhood and the schoolyard before they gorge themselves at the church trough and participate raucously in the annual Christmas pageant. Then — miracle of miracles — the spirit of the Nativity story smoothes over their domineering natures. In taking a fresh look at The Best Christmas Pageant, director Matt Cosper allows his Herdmans to be even wilder and wolfish than they were at Spirit Square in 2002. You could wonder who was worse back then. Was it the Herdmans and their ignorant disregard for Christianity and biblical virtues? Or was it the townspeople — so prejudiced against the Herdmans and so unsympathetic toward their poverty and ignorance?
The prejudice and antipathy are still there for Cosper, but softened just enough to make it less than miraculous for the townspeople to recognize that they’ve actually witnessed the best Christmas pageant ever. To take Barbara Robinson’s script in this direction, highlighting the Herdmans’ metamorphosis while muting the hypocrisy of the townspeople, you need a more powerful breed of actors as the salvageable young savages.
Abetted by the costuming heroics of Bob Croghan, we get finely calibrated transformations from all of the Herdman clan. Daniel Morrice is the chief intimidator as Ralph Herdman until he seizes the role of Joseph in the pageant, but Adriana Jerez is hardly less fearsome as Imogene until she bullies her way to the role of Mary — exactly what is required, since the pageant magic centers on the mother of Jesus. There are four other Herdmans, three of them massed into the gift-giving procession of Wise Men.
So the spotlight shines more brightly on Abby Corrigan as Gladys, the wondrously incorrigible Herdman who revels in the supernatural powers of the Angel and does not intend to confine herself to the mundane words of the script. Theatrical and biblical heresy rolled into one delinquent!
There are more choice roles for young folk here, including Allison Whitmeyer as our sometime narrator Beth Bradley, daughter of Grace, the unseasoned substitute director of the pageant. Alex Noto, as Beth’s younger brother Charlie, is a schoolyard victim of the bullying, eventually playing a pivotal role in the Herdmans’ reclamation. And how about the bitchy Alice Wendleken, town drama queen and presumptive Mary until Imogene swaggers into her pageant turf? Rachel Tate makes Alice worthy of High School Musical.
While the pack of women lacks the virulent biddiness of yore, Rebecca Koon gets to lavish some of her regality on Mrs. Armstrong, the convalescing director who crustily kibitzes Grace while in traction. And the timorous Mrs. McCarthy, entrusted to Amy Van Looy, is strachily alarmist.
If Cosper finds new enlightenment in the Herdmans, then we should also mention the fresh divinity that Nicia Carla infuses into Grace. Mildness is rarely so blithely oblivious to danger or so unflappably firm and sunny. Certainly she is one of the heavenly lights that shines down on the Herdmans, triggering their miracle.
Croghan’s scenic design is as simple as his costumes are baroque. The wildness of the Herdmans stands out in bold relief against the spare suggestions of church and the Star of Bethlehem, while the conventionality of the townspeople is as bland as the lightly stained wood that sketches their town. When the pageant manger comes in from the wings, it really does look more like the Herdmans’ home than anyone else’s. Isn’t that the point?
We really could rejoice greatly in Theatre Charlotte’s reprise of A Christmas Carol. Although I’m not sure that director Vito Abate was quite as successful as he was last year with the outer frame of Doris Baizley’s adaptation of the Dickens classic, the overall effect was stronger. If you’re expecting me to say the increase in strength is the result of massive cast turnover, I’m about to toss you a curve. On the contrary, the most appreciable improvements come from Kevin Campbell and Alan England, both reprising their roles from last year.
England is the nervous director of the traveling players who have been deserted by the actors who portray Scrooge and Tiny Tim. Within the Dickens tale, he’s the ghost of Scrooge’s dead partner, Jacob Marley — with a side order, I suspect, of the mute Christmas Future, uncredited in the playbill. Last year, England may have plunged into the complexities of portraying a mediocre actor/director, aiming this year to simply heighten his characterizations to their utmost. Or perhaps putting the extra work into the production has yielded dividends.
Campbell was every bit as steely as he was last year as the cynical company stage manager — perfect type-casting when a replacement for the absent Scrooge becomes a dire, last-minute necessity. It’s as Scrooge that Campbell, already superb in this production’s premiere in 2007, far surpassed himself. Even with the plot compressed to the verge of hemorrhaging, Campbell kept the entire arc of Scrooge’s journey fresh, coherent, and compelling.
Costumes by Jamie Varnadore and scenic design by Chris Timmons also represented quantum upgrades. New cast members were amazingly fine for such a short run, including Bev Raney and Kathleen Taylor as the long-suffering Bob and Mrs. Cratchit, and precocious third grader Taylor Klauk as Tiny Tim.
This article appears in Dec 9-16, 2008.
