Here We Come A Caroling

Last Friday (the 10th), Mer and I went down to Akron to Actors’ Summit’s new and impressive theater in Greystone Hall to see A Christmas Carol. I have to admit I was not thrilled to be going. I feel as if A Christmas Carol has become so overdone as to become trite and even a little boring. Still, we had season tickets, so off we went.

The set was very simple – just a bare stage with a huge (fifteen feet high) chest at the back of the stage, that opened up to be a backdrop and prop station. At the very start, just two actors came out – a young girl (who would play Tiny Tim) and Neil Thackaberry (who would play Scrooge). They started the play by Neil/Scrooge taking an inventory of stage items. This caught my attention – it was not the beginning I had expected. Actors’ Summit had chosen to do a newer adaptation of Carol that started out as a stage company in crisis – they were supposed to do A Christmas Carol, but the actors playing Tiny Tim and Scrooge were suddenly unavailable, so the stage manager and apprentice had to step in. It resulted in a “frame story” where the play-within-a-play was framed by a fifteen-minute introductory scene and by a 1-minute wrap-up. It added some freshness to the story and got me paying attention.

The actual telling of the well-known story was condensed to the essential action. The entire play, including the new parts, was only ninety minutes long. As such, the play moved along at a very good clip and never got bogged down. It also sprinkled tongue-in-cheek moments in the play, like Neil/Scrooge having to be prompted to say “Bah, humbug!” because he, as a stage manager, did not know the part so well.

The acting was very strong, and the sixth-grade girl playing Tiny Tim was very talented (she even played fiddle at one point). There was a decent amount of live music during the play, and the play openly stressed that it was a play – Neil/Scrooge was worried they had lost Marley’s chain, but the actors assured him they could “create” a chain out of air. All of the props were stylized – white sheets for snow, orange boas being waved to suggest fire, and so on. It was a nice nod to the craft of acting and how things do not have to be realistic to be effective.

This is the good thing about having season tickets, and we find this out every year. If you have the tickets, you end up going to plays you would otherwise skip, and in doing so, you find some real gems.

Saturday was “my day,” and I decided to spend the day being puttery. I ran some errands, including getting a new shovel since my old one was cracking. It was a bit of a madhouse – there was a storm being forecast that was supposed to drop one to two feet of snow here. It ended up dumping about one foot of very light powder over the course of forty-eight hours on Monday and Tuesday, but it made Lowe’s an interesting study in human nature. I went in at about 8:00 to look at shovels, and I stopped to look at the twenty-five or so snow blowers (I may get one in the next year or two). I looked around at other stores for a bigger shovel, and went back to Lowe’s around noon to get the shovel I saw there. In the four or five hours I had been gone, Lowe’s had sold all but three or four of the snowblowers, and some of these were $800 models. Buy stock in Toro – they are going to have a good quarter. The same storm-induced frenzy was true when Mer and I went to get three items at the grocery store later – it was mobbed, and the cashier in the express line said she had never seen anything like it. Mer and I wondered a bit at that – in the cupboard we always have the means to get by for about a week or so, and were a bit surprised that people were laying in supplies. Maybe they were just moving their shopping day up so they could avoid the storm.

Anyway, it was not all errands on Saturday. I was in a movie mood, so we went to Family Video to rent movies for the first time in maybe a year or more. It was my day, so I picked out two movies I wanted to see – The Guns of Navarone, a highly regarded and award-winning fictional WW2 story, and Dear John, a romantic film by the same author who wrote The Notebook.

We watched The Guns of Navarone first, and it was excellent. It had some great actors (Gregory Peck and David Niven), and was shot on location in Greece and so was beautiful. It was pretty tense and at times very intense, and I really enjoyed it. It was longer than I had planned on (over two hours), but a highly worthwhile film.

Dear John was a romance-by-correspondence, since the John of the title was in the army and on duty around the world. It starred Amanda Seyfried as the female love interest, and I had been quite taken by her in the wonderful movie Letters to Juliet. She had been very sweet in Juliet, and so I was hoping for much the same again. Dear John was a little darker than Juliet, but still entertaining. A review had said it was much more romantic than The Notebook; while it is a romantic film, it is certainly not more romantic than The Notebook. I was still glad to have seen Dear John, but I recommend Juliet and Notebook much more (and in that order – Juliet is sweeter than Notebook).

And finally, the big storm did hit us, but was light powder that I kept ahead of in my driveway, so no snowblower needed. It also resulted in two snow days (Monday and Tuesday) at school, so Mer stayed home and graded. Staff (such as myself) are expected to report to work as long as it is safe to do so. I could not see how walking a quarter of a mile in powdery snow would let me stay home, but I did have two quiet and productive days at work.

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