At this point in a normal December, local calendars would be bringing you news of all the tinselly holiday action about to unfold live on theater stages throughout the region. There would be a wide choice of ballet companies performing Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, plus several different ways to experience Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, either dramatized or danced.
For 15 years running, one of those sojourns with Scrooge has taken place at the Center for Performing Arts at Rhinebeck, with Center director Lou Trapani himself portraying the most notorious miser in all of English literature. This stage version is a musical of sorts, with frequent breaks in the dialogue for the actors to break out into song, as appropriate. “We use 33 traditional Christmas carols,” Trapani explains. “Each carol fits the scene and fits the character.”
In this plague year that has brought live drama almost to a standstill, the Center has found an innovative way to make sure that its audiences can still enjoy A Christmas Carol live – and has given a whole new meaning to the term “drive-in theater.” For the next three weekends through December 20, you can watch the show from the heated comfort of your parked car and listen to it over the radio.
To keep things going this past summer, the Center built a temporary 20-by-40-foot outdoor stage on the same side of the building as the main stage, which has exterior doors backstage for the unloading of sets and the like. “We’re planning to make that stage permanent, with a roof to protect the actors,” reports Trapani. “It’s before the Planning Board as we speak.”
With audiences of up to 50 seated picnic-style (but socially distanced) on the Great Lawn, that stage was used for performances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in July, A Chorus Line in August, American Son, Songs for a New World and a dance concert in September. In October, the Center experimented with showing movies on an outdoor screen to viewers in their cars in the parking lot. “We already had a radio transmitter for that, so it was just figuring out where to play,” Trapani says.
In terms of carrying on live performances into the winter season, the problem with the new outdoor stage was the fact that it offers no weather protection to the players. Driving cars onto the lawn and churning it up into muddy ruts was also not such a great idea.
So the Center folks decided to adapt a seven-by-22-foot loading dock at the back of the building into a smaller stage. It’s shielded by a roof overhang and set seven feet above the ground, making the action easily visible from the two rows of cars that can be accommodated in the rear parking lot. They removed a center portion of a railing surrounding the loading dock and “slid in a huge piece of plexiglass,” according to Trapani.
Because the performance space is so much smaller than normal, “This year we have only eight actors. Almost everybody plays three, four or five different people,” as opposed to the usual 30. “But the script is intact.” Besides Trapani as Ebenezer Scrooge, the one-man War on Christmas, the cast includes Andy Crispell, Emily DePew, Ellie DeMan, Joe Felece, Harriet Luongo, Lisa Lynds and Duane Olson. “A lot of these people have been in it from the beginning,” he notes.
The cast’s familiarity with the roles and the material was apparent when the show opened last weekend, with the cast in fine voice and emoting persuasively. For all its sentimentality, Dickens’ story still holds up surprisingly well. We’re still surrounded by people with Scrooge’s attitude of “Are there no workhouses? Are there no prisons?” Although characters as unhesitatingly charitable and forgiving as Bob Cratchit are tough to find in our post-Victorian world, juicy redemption arcs never go out of style. There’s still a need for the tale’s message that even the greediest, most grasping one-percenter can change his behavior, cultivate empathy and find peace of mind.
Performances of A Christmas Carol at the Center for Performing Arts at Rhinebeck begin at 7 p.m. on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays through December 20 and run slightly over an hour in length. Tickets cost $20 per person (not per carload) and can be purchased online at www.centerforperformingarts.org/all-shows/item/a-christmas-carol-2020, or by calling the box office at 876-3080 from noon to 5 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays and from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturdays.
Rest rooms in the theater lobby will be open for one user at a time, but the concession stand will be closed. Bring your own snacks. Radio broadcast of the performance takes place on 100.5 FM.
Attendees are asked to turn off their engines during the performance except as needed to run the heater and/or windshield wipers or charge the car battery. The show will go on in inclement weather, unless extreme storm conditions compromise the safety of performers or audience. Says Lou Trapani, “Weather has not canceled us yet.”
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