Word: caroling
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...brings A Tuna Christmas (a sequel to the long-running Texas jape Greater Tuna), featuring a disaster-prone production of the Dickens story. In two weeks Patrick Stewart shucks his Star Trek: Generations uniform for the dark garb of Ebenezer Scrooge to give 21 dramatic readings of A Christmas Carol. This is Stewart's third New York Christmas in four years, and each time his show has sold out, leading to successively larger venues. This year he will fill the 1,400-seat Richard Rodgers Theatre at $40 and $50 a ticket. Thus does Captain Picard of the 24th century...
...like Amahl and the Night Visitors and Handel's Messiah as surefire crowd lures. The New York City Ballet's production of George Balanchine's The Nutcracker plays to more than 100,000 people each Christmas and earns the company a fat $5.6 million. For regional theaters, A Christmas Carol is an even bigger cash cow. "It pays the bills for the rest of the season," says Lawrence Harbison of Samuel French Inc., the premier play- licensing house. The adaptation of Dickens' 1843 cautionary classic is by far the most widely produced play on the regional circuit...
...little of Dickens' furious humanism surfaces in the most lavish Christmas Carol on display this month in New York. This is the $12 million musical version playing at Madison Square Garden's Paramount theater with its 5,200 seats. The huge stage is dense with the crippled, the homeless, the starving -- and, in this morass of need, one man, Scrooge (Walter Charles), railing against those who would help them. "Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?" Add an "Are there no orphanages?" and you have the agenda of the next Speaker of the House...
...model for this Scrooge was not Newt Gingrich but Charles Dickens. "He was a very generous man," says Mike Ockrent, the show's director and co-author, "but I think he viewed himself as a potential Scrooge -- what he might have become had his attitude been different." This Christmas Carol grafts part of Dickens' biography (his days as a child laborer, his father's trip to debtors' prison) onto Scrooge. It makes him less a villain than a victim of his times. "Scrooge is really every one of us," notes the show's composer, Alan Menken. "We all have...
...more obvious message of the new Carol is that it's big and pretty -- holiday candy for the whole family at $19 to $55 a ticket. It was confected by Broadway's top talent, including set designer Tony Walton, costume designer William Ivey Long, choreographer Susan Stroman and lyricist Lynn Ahrens. Some are working at half speed. Menken's melodies are less inventive than his scores for the Disney cartoons The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. He gets a B+ for hummable ballads and ho-humbuggable comic turns. Stroman's jazziest ideas are reprises of her dancing...