In 1996 I was a junior at the University of Minnesota when a friend invited me along on her family’s annual outing to see A Christmas Carol at the Guthrie Theater. At the time, I was taking Gender and Geopolitics, a class that had me deeply engrossed in the study of socioeconomic strata. Naturally, I thought their little family tradition tediously bourgeois.
At the age of twenty, I had never before participated in such a holiday ritual—not A Christmas Carol, not Black Nativity, not The Nutcracker, not the Lorie Line Christmas Show. My own family lived in a working-class exurb. We weren’t the kind to trek into the city for Dayton’s twelfth-floor holiday exhibit, let alone a play at the Guthrie Theater. Up to then, my theatergoing experience consisted of obligatory field trips and rinky-dink school plays. But beneath the skepticism with which I regarded my inaugural Guthrie visit, there was a longing to participate in a holiday tradition for privileged folks. I was curious about why my friend’s family, most notably her mother, and so many others like her, went to the same show year after year. And why did she demand full participation from every family member, and why did they comply (albeit each in his own way—the father, deferentially; my new friend, apathetically; her youngest sister, the resident theater geek, enthusiastically)?
The Christmas Carol production was altogether underwhelming. What struck me, however, both then and now, was the ritual preamble that led us to the theater lobby: The pre-show feast at my friend’s split-level suburban home, Little Drummer Boy on the car stereo as we exited I-94, walking up Vineland Place with the icy air cutting through my nylons.
Eight years on, my friend and her sister live on opposite coasts, and are therefore relieved of their Christmas Carol duties. I, on the other hand, have now seen the show several times, usually with friends raised under similarly orthodox circumstances. I have softened to this tradition and grown to appreciate the opportunity to don some gay apparel for a night out with loved ones. Each year’s production—not just A Christmas Carol but the pre-and post-show routines surrounding it, no matter which family I tag along with—is virtually a carbon copy of the one before; the only variable, really, is the increasing presence of corporate sponsorship.
A Christmas Carol, of course, is an institution. To some, it’s a smart business practice that nurtures the financial health of a community asset; to others, it’s a crass cash cow. The play earns about twenty percent of the Guthrie’s annual ticket revenue, so there’s plenty of demand, regardless of the heavy rotation. Other theaters have their signature holiday heavyweights, most as immutable as the Guthrie’s: There are Ballet Minnesota’s Nutcracker, Theatre Latté Da’s Christmas Carole Petersen, Illusion’s Christmas show with Miss Richfield, among many others.
Of all the holiday mainstays, Penumbra Theatre’s Black Nativity undergoes the most adventuresome transformation from year to year, skipping across venues and trading up performers. But in 2001, the company premiered a radically re-imagined, rather avant-garde version of Langston Hughes’ Christmas vision, infused with jazz rather than the usual gospel flavor. Black Nativity had been gaining popularity the previous few years, therefore earning an increasing share of Penumbra’s overall revenue. The company made a bold move that year by moving Black Nativity to the Pantages Theater, a far larger venue than the Fitzgerald, the show’s previous home. The hope, it would seem, was to beckon even more people to their show by planting it in the middle of the Hennepin Theater District, where hordes of fair-weather theatergoers already make annual pilgrimages.
Black Nativity nose-dived at the box-office that year, failing to meet revenue projections assigned to it by the perennially cash-strapped Penumbra Company. While folks at Penumbra acknowledge that 2001’s Black Nativity strayed precariously far from the show’s original spirit, they blame the shortfall on the venue, saying capacity at Pantages was greater than demand for tickets. Although the company resurrected its gospel version of Black Nativity the following year and has stuck close by it since, audiences seem to have trouble forgiving the Penumbra for tampering with their favorite show. Facing reduced ticket demand and a seemingly insurmountable deficit, Penumbra cancelled Black Nativity in 2003 and is putting the 2004 production on its quaint home stage, a venue with markedly less seating than those from previous years. If they’ve learned anything by the Guthrie’s example, Penumbra will cast Black Nativity in bronze, rebuilding it as a permanent, reliable standard for families to include among their holiday traditions.
The Christmas Carol experience I had as a young college student is hardly unique: It’s safe to say that most of the people flocking to this year’s staging didn’t see Guthrie productions of Death of a Salesman or Sex Habits of American Women. They’re more likely to be among those milling about the Hennepin Theater District for The Lion King and Phantom of the Opera. In other words, these are “entry-level” theatergoers, like me circa 1996, which is precisely why the Guthrie does not include A Christmas Carol in its subscription packages. Of course, this breed of theatergoer is probably more common than season subscribers, which makes the once-a-year holiday show a lucrative venture.
Financial dependence on holiday revenue is not unique to theater, of course; retailers and restaurants also earn hugely disproportionate slices of their revenue pies between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. ’Tis the season for personal budgets to go on hiatus. This time of year, millions of us are happy to lighten our wallets in exchange for mood-enhancing holiday novelties, be it $24.99 for a candy-cane-spangled turtleneck or $150 for tickets for the family to see The Nutcracker Suite. Complaints about materialism during the season of peace and goodwill to all mankind are now as much a holiday tradition as maxed-out credit cards, hangovers, and the pressure to give (and get) till it hurts. Underpinning all of this festive self-indulgence is a conservative desire to bathe ourselves in comfort and familiarity, to revel in family and friends and A Christmas Carol—in other words, the holidays are no time for the new, the challenging, or the experimental. We want familiar old transgressions and redemptions.
So maybe that explains why non-repertory theaters have been half-empty during the holidays in recent years. Not that smaller theater companies haven’t tried to appeal to our sentimentality with their own mirthful Christmas shows. Open Eye Figure Theatre, a small but renowned puppet and theater company, staged a joy-riding version of the nativity with The Holiday Pageant, which played to marginal success for three consecutive years before taking this season off. Other ambitious companies needing to pad their pockets produce modest versions of the classics. Actors Theater of Minnesota does its own Christmas Carol, for example, while Ballet of the Dolls and Minnesota Dance Theatre are noted for their interpretations of The Nutcracker.
This year, however, Ballet of the Dolls has decided to take Cinderella to the Christmas ball, pointing to another competitive strategy for a saturated holiday market: the staging of a tried-and-true classic from the company repertoire (yes, more shows that lots of us have already seen). Among other iconoclastic companies, the Jungle Theater has established its own tradition with Dylan Thomas’ Under Milkwood, a show that has gone gangbusters on its stage during four previous runs (despite seeming too textual for the average holiday theatergoer’s palette). Theatre de la Jeune Lune, too, is known for slating reprises; this year it offers Molière’s The Miser, a production that won robust ticket sales (and critical enthusiasm) wh
en it played in Boston earlier this year.
Grinch and Scrooge aside, nobody laments this seasonal redundancy like theater critics. To spare its writers, the local newsweekly has a policy of not covering productions it has previously reviewed (which detrimentally affects companies like Open Eye Figure Theatre, which can’t afford advertising and depend upon publicity and word-of-mouth). Critics at the two daily papers, accustomed to spending their time on new work, awake each December like Bill Murray in Groundhog’s Day. Each year they endeavor to dig deep for something “fresh” to say about A Christmas Carol and Black Nativity, reducing them to trivialities such as recounting each show’s already well-known legacy, or noting the gracefulness with which cast members are aging.
Competition among the Guthrie, Penumbra, Ballet Minnesota, and Theatre Latté Da—all of whom cling to December ticket revenue—has only grown fiercer with the advent of touring and off-Broadway Christmas productions. Armed with New York City glitz and colossal advertising budgets, shows like Scrooge—The Musical (starring yesteryear’s TV icon Richard Chamberlain, which just wrapped up a run at the Orpheum Theatre) arrive annually to plunder entry-level theater audiences. (This year, the Twin Cities has escaped the mother of all these productions: The Radio City Christmas Spectacular starring the Rockettes, although the show continues to maraud all over the rest of the country.)
Minnesotans and millions of other non-New Yorkers devour these shows in part because they’re imported, and thereby play upon our cultural inferiority complex. It’s hard not to fall for the bigger-is-better hype that attends most traveling Broadway shows—and it is also true that most of our homegrown companies lack the financial wherewithal to match Broadway’s Busbee Berkeley aesthetic. Like the New York Yankees, Broadway shows offer the biggest spectacle and the best talent that money can buy. Devoted patrons of local companies might find this glut of outsiders and opportunism tacky, but on the other hand, it could be that this exploitation of holiday sentimentality and tradition is simply meeting demand with supply.
Come December, theatergoers are in no mood for thought-provoking stories or political discourse (especially this year). Who, besides a jaded critic, really wants to confront dilemmas, or ponder poetic texts, or be challenged with avant-garde stagings? And we most certainly do not want sex, not right now (though nudie-theater is a big sell the rest of the year—the Jungle, the Guthrie, and the newly defunct Eye of the Storm, for example, have all used nudity with great success in recent years). For now, we will tolerate moderate conflict as long as it has a warm, fuzzy resolution. We also want dancing. And carols. We want mean-uncle reform. We want the biggest present under the tree to be ours, and we want to know what’s inside.
A Christmas Carol endures because it reconnects us with a time when life (and Christmas) seemed as simple as milk and cookies. The holidays put a strain on all of us, but we’re still longing for those carefree Christmases of our youth. We want to wake up fresh and eager and innocent at five a.m. on Christmas morning. What did Santa get me? Another pair of flannel pajamas? How many melting moments can I shove into my mouth when mom’s not looking?
Christmas is truly our most childish holiday, but I suspect we all want in on the magic. So we bake lots of cookies and buy lots of presents, just like our parents did. And if we grew up attending A Christmas Carol every year, we go again. (Those who loathe this cyclical dumbing-down of theater can always spend December at the cinema, where a host of artful movies get released to vie for Oscar nominations.) Like the ornaments we resurrect each year to trim the tree, A Christmas Carol looks as it did thirty years ago—making it more reliable than even a Broadway show. So long as we can keep watching it through young eyes, it will always be passably fun.
So who can blame me and the rest of the theatergoing public for not wanting to spoil our happy reminiscences with the likes of Anton Chekhov and Bertolt Brecht? There’ll be plenty of time during the doldrums of January and February for challenging and risky work to counter the wet-rag discourse pervading our increasingly capitalistic theaters. After the Nutcrackers are packed away and Dickens’ Christmas ghosts are laid to rest for another year, I will look forward to Penumbra’s Slippery When Wet and the Guthrie’s Oedipus the King, and to the next offerings from the likes of Frank Theatre and Ten Thousand Things. But for now, I figure, why not buy into the December brain freeze?
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