Review: "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever" Reservations: 50 or Limited capacity with socially distant seating. 11 and 12 at Cape Cod Theatre Company/Harwich Junior Theatre, 105 Division St., West Harwich tickets: $25 $20 for seniors $15 for under age 21. While Scrooge is given ample stage time here in the early scenes and finale, much of the rest focuses on a colorful round of other characters and a kaleidoscope of events more than many adaptations. One more thing: Having just one man on stage for this story makes you realize how much of most Scrooge characterizations is watching and reacting to the events the ghosts of other Christmases makes him watch.
McGarry’s version also includes infrequently used passages you may have long forgotten from the novel. This show was created using Dickens’ words and while there are highlights from so many adaptations - “If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population” “Every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart” “There's more of gravy than of grave about you” etc.
Worth noting: A familiarity with the details of Scrooge’s story would be an asset for patrons as McGarry’s rapid-fire monologue both as narrator and every character sweeps through the story’s events. The West Harwich stop is part of a short return New England tour of his unique show. His exuberant delivery of Fezziwig’s party when Scrooge was a young man will make you smile.įun fact: McGarry is a Barnstable High graduate who was founding artistic director for South Shore-based Bay Colony Shakespeare Company before moving to Europe with his family several years ago. Highlight of the show: McGarry is on his own for this tour de force, but you might swear there are other people on stage as he convincingly creates conversations, hugs and even dancing between multiple characters. McGarry’s performance is on a largely bare stage, inventively and effectively using just a trunk, a chair and a few props – including a long white sash and sonorous bells – to create the classic scenes and develop a rapport with the audience. See it or not? McGarry commands the stage in an extraordinary feat of acting, memorization and nerve for a more than two-hour, two-act production that brings warmth and humor - yes, humor - to the tale of a miserable man learning lessons of caring for your fellow man and keeping Christmas in your heart.
#PROBLEM CHILD COMIC PROFESSIONAL#
What it’s about: Professional actor McGarry comes home to Cape Cod with his one-man retelling of the beloved Christmas story about the redemption of miser Ebenezer Scrooge after he is visited by four ghosts and shown the error of his ways. The discussion’s respondent and moderator will be Charles Everett Pace, a scholar and historical interpreter who has portrayed such historical figures as Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes and Malcolm X. A live discussion will follow the presentation of the three plays, and viewers will be invited to participate. Growing up white in the South, both playwrights have stories to tell about racial injustice, white supremacy and the challenges of racial reckoning.
#PROBLEM CHILD COMIC FREE#
Wellfleet Preservation Hall will host a free virtual production of three short plays by Wellfleet playwrights Candace Perry and John Dennis Anderson at 7 p.m. What's new Three short plays on racial reckoning In the Mid-Cape, Cotuit Center for the Arts is producing "Elf, the Musical" but tickets are sold out for the in-person run.
The weekend's final show is virtual and serious: plays by local writers to spark a discussion of racial reckoning. We've got a review of those as well as the Dublin-set "Once" musical romance in Orleans. Two shows on Cape stages this weekend are aimed squarely at the holiday audience, while another is a feel-good musical and virtual event tackles a thought-provoking topic.īoth holiday stories are classics: Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" told in a tour de force one-man performance and a family event with many children on stage for Barbara Robinson's "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever." Watch Video: Will it be a white Christmas?