For One Brave Company, the Show Did Go On

Most theatre companies had the luxury of canceling weekend shows due to inclement weather -- even PNB's Nutcracker. But if you were Bishop Blanchet High School, and you had the Moore rented out for a four-day, six-show run of A Christmas Carol, rescheduling wasn't an option. Hence, the Greenlake-area school instituted a liberal ticket policy, crossed its fingers, and hoped its loyalists would brave the ice. Brave it they did, and the onstage Braves (this'd be the nickname of the school's athletic teams) delivered a presciently economical, Tim Burton-esque rendering of the Dickensian classic that made attendees proud to have abandoned their wood stoves.

Full dislcosure: I am an alum of the Blanchet drama program, having played the town drunk in Wonderful Town my senior year (yep, typecasting was alive and well back then). That play, like most BHS productions, was three hours long with an intermission and featured a lot of showy roles for upperclassmen who'd waited patiently to take the longest of bows. By contrast, A Christmas Carol came in at about the running time of an Adam Sandler movie, and required no mid-show break. While John Rising's Scrooge remained onstage for most of the show, much of his time there was spent silently viewing his past, present, and future. Mostly, the show was a cavalcade of sublime 10-minute performances, a master's course in thespian sprinting highlighted by the performances of Karl Johnson (Tiny Tim), tap-dancin' Kurt Langmeyer (Ghost of Christmas Present), and Parker Viydo, whose silvery, wild-haired Marley was made up to look like the long lost lovechild of Edward Scissorhands and the Tin Man.

In a way, that people had to overcome Mother Nature's hardest left hook simply to get to the show was fitting. A Christmas Carol is all about recognizing that as bad as you might have it, someone's got it worse -- a fitting message in a worsening economic recession with the potential to slip into a full-blown depression. As a result, my fellow onlookers and I felt the full thrust of Dickens' tale there at the Moore, just in the (saint) nick of time.