Artie, one of our writers and the reluctant star of ConAm’s Xmas Spectacular, recently blogged about the creation of the show. Here’s a sample.

What We Seek To Achieve
Here are our goals as I see them:

Return relevance to A Christmas Carol. Every production of A Christmas Carol is — properly — a celebration of the brilliance of Charles Dickens and the gloom of 19th Century England. But how can we make it relevant to today? This might sound too Jewish for you, but the Passover Seder does that every year: Exodus isn’t primarily about our ancestors; it’s about us, here, now. (It’s no wonder Jews do so well in Hollywood.) We want to do that with A Christmas Carol: tell the story so that it is about us, here, now.

Remind us of the true message. It really isn’t about money. Scrooge’s more egregious miserliness isn’t with currency; it’s his denial of engagement and relationship. He is stingy with his affection and connection. Let’s not focus on the money. Watch the heart. Draw audience to theatre. We long to bring back folks who enjoyed our recent productions of The Odd Couple and Our Town. And, wouldn’t it be great if we also attracted folks who don’t go to theatre that often but might come because my shamelessly public mid-life crisis has been held over for an extended run?

Raise money for Available Light. All year long, Available Light offers professional theatre — homegrown! organic! — for the strange price of pay what you want. Why? Because theatre is too important to be the exclusive possession of the economically fortunate. So, for this show, we’ll charge $15 per seat — more for the beloved patrons (like you?) — to amass a surplus, and help fund the year-round mission of this wonderful theatre company.

Achieve a magic moment as performers. Jo Anne and I — with Matt as director, and all the talented folks of Available Light — just want to do it again: create genuine, true-to-our-souls flow on stage. We seek — and we will find — the optimal experience.