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Pocket Theatre brings 'A Christmas Carol' to life on stage
Author’s note: In an effort to cover community events, The Hot Springs Post strives to regularly run stories featuring Pocket Theatre productions. In order to continue coverage of the community theatre, as the sole journalist reporting for The Post I wrote this article, despite my affiliation of performing in A Christmas Carol as a caroler. Every effort was made to eliminate sway and objectification in covering this topic.
The Pocket Community Theatre will host the first of six showings of A Christmas Carol tonight (Friday). What better way to get in the holiday spirit than to attend a live showing of this Dickens classic?
The schedule of the performances set to play the next two weekends, along with tickets, can be found here.
While attendees can expect the base of the classic tale ringing familiar with Scrooge being a terror before having ghosts come to him to correct the errors in his ways… there’s a bit more of a comedic element, Director James Kendall* said.
“The first thing they can expect is they’re going to see the traditional story of Ebenezer Scrooge and his path to repentance straight from the dickens classic, but, it’s also going to be something that is very funny,” Kendall said.
“This show has a lot of comedy written into it. Traditionally, A Christmas Carol isn’t a show that’s known as a funny show. It’s really, when you think about the movies and if you’ve read the book, it’s pretty serious content. But this one, people are going to laugh and they’re going to boo, and they’re going to cry. Not necessarily in that order, but they are.”
Kendall said he expects the audience to experience an array of emotions in hating scrooge, laughing at the antics and crying at the main villain’s revelation in the end of the story.
“But they’ll find a traditional Christmas Carol,” he said. “There’s Tiny Tim, there’s Bob Cratchet, there’s Ebinezer Scrooge, there’s Marley. All the characters are there, it’s just how it’s presented is going to be a little bit different because we’re using less actors and it’s a comedy.”
Kendall said the use of less actors resulting in the same actors playing multiple characters is what’s going to surprise people the most.
“If you’re coming in expecting to see a five-year-old kid playing Tiny Tim, that’s not this show,” he said. “It’s all adults, so having one actor play six different characters is something that a lot of people aren’t use to. There’s very few shows that are out there that have that aspect to it.
“… There’s very few shows that are written that way, so I think that’ll surprise people. ‘Wasn’t he this person? Oh, that was that person in the previous scene.’
“That’s something that I think they’ll find interesting and enjoy because from an actor’s perspective, playing one character, especially with a British accent, is challenging, (but) playing six different characters with six different kinds of British accents, the complexity to that and the challenge to the actor is just off the charts, and the quality of actors that we have here, the ability they have to pull that off is going to really impress people.”
Additionally Kendall said the show is “very family friendly.”
“I think children will enjoy some of the comedic antics in the show,” he said. “Obviously, it just depends on your kid. Some five year olds will be bored with any show you put on … so it really just depends on who the kid is.”
Ultimately, Kendall said he wants the audience to know the hard work that was put into production on a 100% volunteer basis.
“The carolers, the cast, Ebenezer Scrooge has a tremendous amount of dialogue, so a tremendous amount of work has gone into this show,” he said. “… You’ll see it by the quality of the performance.”
*Kendall has no relation to the author of this article.