Boston Spotlight: December 2005

Dueling Scrooges dominate local stages this month, scowling their way toward eleventh-hour enlightenment. The New Rep’s production of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (December 10-24), features local faves such as Leigh Barrett and Steve Barkhimer accompanying themselves (a la the new Sweeney Todd); the North Shore Music Theatre version, A Christmas Carol, A Musical Ghost Story (December 2-24), presents Broadway vet George Dvorsky in his 14th turn as the Ghost of Christmas Present; and in Trinity Rep’s 29th annual A Christmas Carol, company stalwarts William Damkoehler and Timothy Crowe alternate as Scrooge in this double-cast production.

Boston’s Black Nativity has enlisted a formidable guest star to kick off its 36th season: Ruby Dee will appear December 2-3, and the show continues through the 18th. New Haven’s Long Wharf also has a long tradition of presenting the Langston Hughes classic: this year’s dates are December 14-18 (click here for details).

Seasonal alterna-fare includes a pair of exercises in nostalgia: White Christmas, starring Broadway vet Stephen Bogardus, continues at the Wang Center through New Year’s Eve, while Stoneham Theatre serves up A Christmas Story (through December 23). Elsewhere, there’s Rough and Tumble’s Apocalypso! — promising “parties, presents, friends, family, barflies, crippling depression and feelings of inadequacy” (December 2-17), and L.A.-based comedian Marty Barrett’s Dial M for Xmas, or Homicide for the Holidays, at the Boston Playwrights Theatre (December 22-23). And while there will be no Gold Dust Orphans Christmas show this year, it is for the best of reasons: Ryan Landry’s sendup Cinderella Rocks proved so popular, it has run a solid two months and has now been extended to at least December 10.

Meanwhile, the serious theatres in the region, large and small, forge on oblivious of seasonal frivolity. The American Repertory Theatre promises an avant-garde Three Sisters, directed by Polish luminary Krystian Lupa
(through January 1). Former ART intern Sarah Friedberg mounts Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in the dollhouse-size Devanaughn Theatre (December 2-11). The scrappy TheatreZone in Chelsea collaborates with the contemporary-classical Ensemble Warhol to present Max Frisch’s post-World War II morality play The Firebugs (December 8-23).

Noted playwright Theresa Rebeck chose her alma mater, Brandeis, as a try-out spot for The Two Orphans, a new musical for which she and John Sheehy penned the lyrics. (The score is by Kim Sherman). The show, about a pair of African-American sisters struggling to survive in post-Civil War New Orleans, is adapted from a 19th-century melodrama and rounded out by traditional and original melodies (December 1-11).

The Lyric Stage is busy introducing Boston to Regina Taylor’s Crowns (through December 23). This rousing musical paean to African-American church ladies and their “hattitude” boasts a terrific local cast, including Jacqui Parker and Merle Perkins. Audience members who sport especially impressive crowns may qualify for a photograph to be posted on the “Crowning Wall of Fame.”

Fringy comedy abounds: e.g., Dan Hunter’s The Red Elm, about the disputed disposition of a family farm, at the Boston Playwrights Theatre (December 1-8) and P.S. Page Me Later, an Alarm Clock Theatre Company compendium inspired by Found magazine, at the Boston Center for the Arts
(December 2-17).The usually edgy Animus Ensemble takes on the Burt Bacharach/Neil Simon 1972 musical Promises, Promises at the BCA’s Calderwood Pavilion (December 9-18).

Fresh from its triumphant King Lear, the Actors Shakespeare Project goes a little lighter with Twelfth Night, at Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center (December 15-January 8). They’ll be picking up the torch from the Gamm Theatre in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, whose Twelfth Night employs the redoubtable Wendy Overly as master manipulator Maria (through December 18).

In addition to its Christmas Carol, Trinity Rep has managed to squeeze in Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers by William S. Yellow Robe, Jr (December 2-January 8). Co-produced with Penumbra Theatre Company in St. Paul, Minnesota, this touring show examines the challenges facing a young man whose parentage suspends him between two cultures: African-American and Native-American.

The unseen protagonist of Rob Handel’s Aphrodisiac, at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre has been leading a double life of a different sort: as an upstanding congressman and as a philanderer — possibly a murderer. The scandal, with its obvious allusion to the Gary Condit-Chandra Levy affair, is seen through the eyes of the former paragon’s adult children, played by Jennifer Dundas and Rob Campbell, with a little insight from a certain notorious intern (through January 1).

The Westport Playhouse, reveling in its first winter season, offers a different Dickens: David Copperfield, co-directed by Joanne Woodward and Anne Keefe, and featuring such acting stalwarts as Beth Fowler, Simon Jones, and Bill Buell alongside Mark Shanahan and Kieran Campion who play the hero at two different ages (December 1-17).