God Bless Us, Every One: A (Different) Christmas Carol at the Provincetown Theater

Back in the days of small traveling circuses and vaudevillian entertainment, actors and crew trekked from town to town to present their shows before moving on to the next venue.

Sometimes, things get lost along the way.

That’s what’s happened to this extremely low-budget (it is the Depression, after all) vaudevillian troupe staging Dickens’ A Christmas Carol: both Tiny Tim and Scrooge are MIA. What to do? The director (Brett Parson) must re-cast the show; a stagehand (Bryant A Marshall) eagerly offers to fill in for Tim, while the players draft a clearly reluctant and overly fussy stage manager (Paul E Halley) as Scrooge.

The troupe proceeds to make its way through the story, creating fog, snow, fire, and ghosts through mime, imagination, creative (and clearly inexpensive) visual effects… and with a lot of surprises along the way.

It’s so interesting seeing the levels of transformation as actors playing actors adjust their performances to their characters. No one in this troupe is ever winning an Oscar, and everyone seems to delight in their over-the-top work. Halley has a particularly difficult job: playing an “actor” who has never acted before, keeping the internal show going in his role as Scrooge while at the same time showing that the stage manager isn’t quite sure about—or ready for—this acting gig. It leads to some over-acting that’s particularly funny.

But to be fair, the whole play-within-a-play is, all of it, hilariously funny. This dynamic is wonderfully clear in the three actors who play the clowns (Andrew Clemons, Thom Markee, and Copper Santiago); Santiago in particular has some serious circus chops.

He’s not onstage nearly enough, but Jacob Marley (Eric Auger) is a treat (“a lot of good Christmas did him!” comments Scrooge); Auger also doubles (though you won’t see much of him) as the Ghost of Christmas Future, in an impressive much-larger-than-life costume and presence. Here I must add that the costumes, production design, and makeup are all excellent across the board, thanks to Thom Markee and Jenni Baldwin. Most of the set pieces are contained in the traveling company’s shipping trunk, and they’re wonderfully eccentric and slapdash… but so versatile!

Sean Flyr is a memorable Bob Cratchit; together, he and Denise Page as Mrs. Cratchit form a touching and believable family. While Cratchit is of course anxious and eager-to-please around Scrooge, he maintains a boundary that isn’t seen in too many versions of the story; he gives the role a dignity and lack of obsequiousness that’s interesting. And Page’s lullaby to Tiny Tim is beautiful.

The ensemble cast works wonders playing both the troupe itself and the characters within the story: Jen Cabral (Mrs. Fezziwig/scavenger), Racine Oxtoboy (ingenue/scavenger), Laura Scribner (Christmas Past/scavenger), Patrick Lenihan (Fred), Connie Chan (charitable woman/scavenger), Sabrina Kulka (caroler/Mrs. Fred), Ian Leahy (old clown/Mr. Fezziwig), and Bob Junker (schoolmaster/fence). Each member of the company gets a moment or two to shine.

In addition, this may be the only version of the story in which Ali Baba (Parson) and Robinson Crusoe’s parrot (Markee) appear. They’re marvelous. David Drake is—as always—a brilliant director, and Joshua Quiñones’ music direction (mostly via a guitar) makes sense in the context of a traveling troupe (it is, after all, portable).

And just as a final note: this show is loud, so be prepared for that. There’s a lot of very slapstick comedy, which is of course absolutely on-point for the kind of theatre featured here, but takes a moment to get used to. It’s a totally fun romp through a beloved tale and your holiday season will be incomplete without it.

Review by Jeannette de Beauvoir

Photos by Bob Tucker/Focalpoint