’T?is the season when theaters go into hibernation or pull out the Christmas shows. Two Western Mass. companies — Old Deerfield Productions and Berkshire Theatre Group — are staging A Christmas Carol this month, along with Hartford Stage’s annual edition. In Putney, Vermont, Sandglass Theater celebrates An Almost Victorian Christmas, and Shakespeare & Company are playing an old-time radio version of It’s a Wonderful Life.
For my part, I’ve just directed a live-on-stage radio “broadcast” of another movie chestnut, Miracle on 34th Street. Which is why I particularly enjoyed one scene of Christmas on the Rocks at Hartford’s TheaterWorks.
In it, a bitter and jaded realtor named Susan Walker spills her troubles to a sympathetic bartender. “I used to be the world’s most adorable little girl,” she sneers, downing another shot. She once believed in “lovely intangibles” and that nice snowy-bearded old man who had led her mother, a department head at Macy’s, and her lawyer stepfather to her dream house. Then the marriage fell apart, and now Susan’s has too, and with it all but the last remnants of her little-girl dreams. “I wasted a lot of time believing in Santa,” she grumbles.
In other words, it’s a wicked parody of Miracle on 34th Street. It’s one of seven short sketches that make up this collection of twisted tales. Each one is written by a different playwright, most of them with previous TheaterWorks credits, and together they represent a comically cynical revenge fantasy, getting even with all those treacly tales of goodwill. Each scene focuses on a sweet child from one of those classics, now grown up. As one character observes, “People you like when you’re kids, sometimes they grow up and they’re not so nice.”
In Matthew Lombardo’s “Going Green,” we find little Cindy Lou of Whoville, now a blowsy drunk, ranting about a disastrous affair with the Grinch. Theresa Rebeck imagines a grown-up Tiny Tim recalling his savior, Mr. Scrooge, who after a “psychotic break” became “the Warren Buffet of his time.” For Edwin Sanchez, the little ballerina Clara is a middle-aged Russian harridan who rages against her philandering husband, the Nutcracker.
Rudolph gets a going-over in Jeffrey Hatcher’s vision of Hermie the (gay) elf, bitching about the red-nosed star’s fame and fortune. Jacques Lamarre’s Charlie Brown, still morose and bald, is married to Lucy, now a licensed psychotherapist who charges a lot more than five cents a session. And Ralphie Parker, the little boy who longed for that Red Ryder B.B. gun, is now one eye short.
The whole thing takes place in a rundown bar on Christmas Eve “in a lonely corner of the cosmos.” It’s performed by Ronn Carroll, as the avuncular barkeep, and two marvelously versatile actors. Harry Bouvy plays Ralphie with an eye patch and a snarl; Tiny Tim has greasy hair and a Cockney lilt; and Hermie is so flaming he could set a Yule log ablaze.
Jenn Harris’ Susan is uptight and pants-suited, her Cindy Lou foul-mouthed and sprawlingly sloshed, and her Clara equally pissed (in both senses) in a frilly nightie and beribboned ringlets. The production, conceived and directed by Rob Ruggiero, is funny and charming in a snarky kind of way, and a suitable antidote for a surfeit of holiday sugarplums.•
Through Dec. 21, TheaterWorks, 233 Pearl St., Hartford, (860) 527-7838, info at theaterworkshartford.org.
Chris Rohmann is at StageStruck@crocker.com and his StageStruck blog is at valleyadvocate.com/blogs/stagestruck.
