Two holiday shows

If you’re managing to keep in the holiday spirit, you might want to know about that a couple promising Christmas shows open tonight. Both are reprises. There’s Ballet of the Dolls’s irreverent take on The Nutcracker, which bears the telling subhead (Not So) Suite. This plays at the Ritz. There’s also The Seven Poor Travellers, local actor/writer Charlie Bethel’s one-man adaptation of Charles Dickens’s short story, which plays at Illusion Theater. I saw it last year, and was rather enchanted by the generous spirit of the thing, which still managed, against all odds, to avoid too much earnestness or sap. (Sentimentality is a constant criticism hurled at Dickens. But in this instance I don’t find that to be the case.) It’s thick on words though, so it should only be considered by fierce lovers of florid Victorian prose. I can’t seem to locate the year-old freelance review I wrote about the show for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. But I do remember quoting something I overheard in the lobby later that evening: “That was a perpetual language machine,” remarked a young, and probably fairly hung-over, theatergoer. But even a perpetual language machine can be endured when it’s only an hour long.