Ghosts of Christmas Past

CRIT-MAH!

For a couple of decades last century, there were scores of community theatre members in Newnan, GA, for whom that cryptic cry was an in-joke, a sure marker of your belonging to those who brought A Christmas Carol to life every year at Newnan Community Theatre Company.

It comes from having to control an offstage chorus’s sibilance in the opening number, a sharply accented “Christmas!” I simply tagged three people to sing the word as written — everyone else sang “Crit-mah!,” thereby avoiding a slippery mess of S’s trailing off in a deflating hiss.

These appeared in my house a couple of weeks ago.

These are original scripts for my adaptation of the Dickens classic. Someone was cleaning out their closets and found them and thought I might like to see them. I had completely forgotten that we used to have these “permanent” scripts that we’d collect after the show each year and then hand out again the next year.

And how old are these? They were printed on a dot matrix printer. Oy.

“Wait a second,” I hear you asking, “Dale wrote a version of Christmas Carol? With songs even?”

Indeed I did. I will not bore you with repeating the two blog posts I’ve already written (here and here) — apparently the universe demands that I promote the show every two years — but I will say that if your theatre company needs a tight, fun version of CC, I encourage you to check it out.