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12/06/2017 11:01 PMSometimes it’s good to spice up a Christmas tradition and several holiday perennials are being refreshed in Hartford this season: A Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story of Christmas at Hartford Stage and Christmas on the Rocks at TheaterWorks.
Michael Preston succeeds Bill Raymond who has played Ebenezer Scrooge in Michael Wilson’s lively adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic for 17 of the theater’s past 19 seasons. The show runs to Saturday, Dec. 30.
“Michael has an amazing ability to connect both emotionally and physically as an actor,” says director Rachel Alderman. “Here he brings wonderful things to life from his background with the [new vaudeville ensemble] The Flying Karamazov Brothers.” Preston was a member of that new vaudeville troupe of comedy, juggling, and cirque skills from 1991 to 2000.
Preston, who is also an associate professor of dance and theater at Trinity College, is familiar with Hartford Stage’s production, playing the character of Mr. Marvel for the past five years.
“One of the things I loved about Bill,” says Preston, “is that you so wanted Scrooge to make it through to his redemption at the end and his experience his glorious realization that things can change.”
Over at TheaterWorks, producing artistic director Rob Ruggiero was looking to add a new title to Christmas on the Rocks, the anthology of seven short works that take youngsters featured in holiday classics and comedically envision what their lives turned out to be as adults, such as sour and not-so-Tiny Tim, a grown-up Ralph from A Christmas Story, and a mid-life crisis Charlie Brown.
Last year Ruggiero added a new episode to the mix based on Frosty the Snowman. That piece replaced Matthew Lombardo’s farcical spin on Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas, centering on a now-ribald Cindy Lou Who. (Lombardo, who grew up in Wethersfield, expanded his 10-minute sketch into a full-length show and it is now playing off-Broadway after winning a lawsuit against the Dr. Seuss estate for the right to parody the original material.)
All the characters in the playlets meet separately at a lonely bar on Christmas Eve. This year the bartender will be played by Tom Bloom, who succeeds Ronn Carroll, who has been serving up the drinks to these fanciful characters for the last four seasons. All the seasonal characters are played by Matthew Wilkes and Jenn Harris.
Ruggiero is also rotating another show out of the line-up: Jonathan Tolin’s take on the little girl from the film Miracle on 34th Street.
In its place he turned to playwright Jacques Lamarre (The Raging Skillet, I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti) to re-envision as an adult Zuzu, the youngest daughter of George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart in the 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s a tiny role in the movie, played by Karolyn Grimes, and best remembered for the memorable line at the end: “Look, Daddy! Teacher says every time a bell rings an angel gets its wings.”
Lamarre, who already had the Peanuts parody in the show, says he was so inspired by the possibilities for Zuzu he didn’t know which of his four imagined versions to submit.
In the first, his adult Zuzu has no interest in running her father’s savings and loan business and is now emulating greedy Mr. Potter, the film’s villain. Another version has that same premise with a more Trump-like spin—”But I realized that people don’t want politics during the holidays,” says Lamarre. A third had Zuzu as a Hare Krishna disciple.
The version that made it to the stage features the adult Zuzu with an anxiety disorder about bells.
“Every time she hears one, she unravels,” says Lamarre.
The title of the 10-minute piece is, appropriately, It’s a Miserable Life.
Frank Rizzo is a freelance journalist who lives in New Haven and New York City. He has been writing about theater and the arts in Connecticut for nearly 40 years.