As the holiday season approaches we are getting ready for three heartwarming experiences for our community to come enjoy, connect and feel the magic of the season. A Jingle Jangle Christmas Music Revue, Yes Virginia there is a Santa Claus and the beautiful Charles Dickens classic, A Christmas Carol.
Multiple adaptations of A Christmas Carol have been a part of ECTC history since the very beginning. Our first professional production was a three-person adaptation written by Nathanael called A Dickens Christmas. We can still hear the incomparable Darla Briganti bellowing the lines as Marley’s Ghost, vibrating the verbiage in an eerie, ghostly cadence. Some years later that same adaptation was done with four actors including an accomplished violinist. Fast forward to Christmas 2020 and ECTC presents Barlow’s version of the classic with the inimitable Bruce Collier at the helm as Scrooge. Some of the things we love about this version is that 5 actors play all the characters in the story. Barlow does a beautiful job of highlighting the personal trauma that Scrooge experienced as a child which explains his hardened heart. There is also an incredibly touching scene where he faces his past and his hard heart melts, as does ours as we experience it anew alongside him. It’s the turning point, the character arc, the part of the story we long for in all humanity.
Marci Duncan is our guest director for this production so although the story may be familiar, there are new actors and a new director telling it from a different perspective. It’s going to be everything we need and want out of a traditional holiday offering. So, don’t “Bah, Humbug” this opportunity to experience live theatre, even if you have seen the production before!
In celebration of this show, we thought we’d share with you our top 10 most recognizable and descriptive quotes from the story to get you in the spirit before coming to the show.
10. “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”
9.“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
8.“Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!”
7.“Reflect upon your present blessings—of which every man has many—not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.”
6.“But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time…as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely”
5.“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year…”
4.“While there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good-humour.”
3.“No space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity misused!”
2.“For it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself.”
So much of the Christmas spirit is captured in some of these lines and reflected in this redemptive story come to life on stage. We hope you will join us this season as we “honour Christmas” in our hearts and in our community. With all the joy we have this season we wish you the happiest of holidays and leave you with our number one, and what we know is Tiny Tim’s number one quote:
1.“God bless us every one!”
~ ANNA AND NATHANAEL FISHER, EMERALD COAST THEATRE COMPANY
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