Word: caroll
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...takes a Scrooge to say so out loud, but America's regional theaters have become sickly dependent on A Christmas Carol. Dozens of troupes mount Dickens' sentimental fantasy year after year -- using at least 20 different adaptations, most by artistic directors yearning to be credited as authors -- with ever diminishing artistic vigor yet unflagging box-office success. The profusion of wigs, frock coats and fake British accents typically has little to do with the rest of these companies' productions or the core creative reasons they exist. The show serves only as a cash cow and, in extreme cases, a tool...
...Christmas Carol is emphatically not part of recent tradition at Seattle Repertory Theater. In fact, it has been a standing joke within the troupe that artistic director Daniel Sullivan always fills the holiday slot with some play involving suicide. So when he decided to do the ultimate "Bah, humbug!" and create a show mocking the Carols elsewhere, he wrote an offstage suicide into the script. That small self-indulgence is about the only inside joke in Inspecting Carol, a piece so accessible and hilariously funny that, to Sullivan's surprise, it is also being produced this holiday season by half...
...Sullivan's version, the man mistaken for an inspector is actually a computer wonk turned would-be actor. Aggressively talentless, he is nonetheless welcomed into the panicky troupe and cast as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. The play's finale, a catastrophic Christmas Carol that is the funniest scene on any American stage this year, echoes the uproarious mangling of Romeo and Juliet in Nicholas Nickleby. Props and gimmicks fail. The set collapses. One actor forgets all his lines in terror. And Tiny Tim, played all through rehearsals by a plump pubescent brat who has held the role...
Sullivan's next Seattle venture is an adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov just as insouciant as Inspecting Carol. "It won't retain much of the plot," he says, "because it will star a juggling troupe, the Flying Karamazov Brothers." After this, his 12th season, Sullivan will take a year's sabbatical to do some writing and, if the project comes off, direct a long- planned film of Rappaport. But he will stay involved with fund raising for a new 300-seat second stage in Seattle and will definitely return. Says he: "I've never not been part of a group...
...Carol Bartz, businesswoman, joining the chorus who urged Clinton to make the tough decisions while he had the presidential honeymoon...