AURORA | The holiday season can make even the slightest creative risks a whole lot riskier for local theater companies looking to attract new audiences.
It’s an effect that seems counter-intuitive. In the roughly five weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, the audience base for reliable seasonable productions like “A Christmas Carol” and “White Christmas” swells. For many families, it’s the one time of the year when choose a live stage production over a movie. The holidays draw more casual performing arts patrons to the stage, whether that stage is at a community theater or at the metro area’s flagship performing arts center.
But that higher traffic doesn’t make the task of choosing the right production any easier for directors and producers.
“It’s really difficult to find something that’s going to be satisfying to your regular subscribers as well as those who go to the theater once a year,” said Charles Packard, executive producer at the Aurora Fox theater. “You know there are more theatergoers that time of year, but you also know that there are more products available. If you’re doing something risky, it’s riskier at Christmas time. If you’re doing something tried and true, it’s more tried and true.”
This year, the Fox has split its approach between reliability and risk. In addition to a production of “A Christmas Carol” that kicked off the day after Thanksgiving, the Fox will also mount the regional premiere of Catherine Bush’s “Wooden Snowflakes,” a romantic comedy that came through the theater’s “Read and Rant” program. That program is dedicated specifically to finding new works to produce at the Fox, an effort that feels like a bit of a gamble.
But the approach has paid off for the Fox in the past. In December, 2009, the theater ran a successful production of “A Christmas Story,” a show based on the 1983 Christmas film. In the winter of 2010, the theater hosted the regional premiere of “Red Ranger Came Calling,” a show developed by Seattle’s Book-It Repertory Theatre based on a children’s book by “Bloom County” cartoonist Berkley Breathed.
“For quite a number of the core Fox audience, they felt that that was one of the most successful productions ever,” Packard said.
This year, the theater has added a reliable staple to its debut in the form of David and Julie Payne’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’ novella “A Christmas Carol.” The show will also travel to the PACE Center in Parker after its run in Aurora. According to Packard, who also directed the production, he’s avoided any modern tweaks to the tale of Ebenezer Scrooge and the Christmas ghosts. Instead, the show is faithful to every letter of the original text, he said.
“There are tons of adaptations. It seems like everybody writes their own. I believe in a very traditional telling of the story. I go back to the novel whenever I have a question about staging,” Packard said. “It’s been five years since we did it. It looks like very few if any other major theaters are doing it this year. Everybody loses their profit on it if everybody does it at the same time.”
Profit wasn’t the only reason that the Denver Center Theatre Company took a break from their longstanding “Christmas Carol” tradition for 2011. According to Kent Thompson, the artistic director of the DCTC, the decision to stage the Irving Berlin musical “White Christmas” in place of the Dickens classic boiled down to questions of artistic integrity. The show has been part of the Denver Center’s season for nearly 20 years, and yanking it from the rotation was bound to bring some criticism, Thompson said.
“The dark side of holiday programming can be that they only want us to do one of six titles. We gotta do ‘The Nutcracker.’ We gotta do the Rockettes Christmas show,” Thompson said. “But I think the positive side is that people do want more than just popular entertainment at Christmas. People tend to reflect on their values and beliefs, whether they like it or not.”
Reach reporter Adam Goldstein at agoldstein@aurorasentinel.com.