IVORYTON – The Ivoryton Playhouse provides a fresh take on Dickens’s timeless A Christmas Carol with their production of Charles Evered’s An Actor’s Carol, which is on stage currently through Sunday, Dec. 22.
It tells the tale of Hugh Pendleton, an actor drained of artistic passion after having played the character of Scrooge one too many times, which leads to Pendleton encountering three ghosts of his own. A cast of four actors plays 17 different characters in this hilarious new look at a classic that reminds us that the most jaded among us can find magic in the holiday season – and in the theater as well.
An Actor’s Carol made its premiere in 2015 in Palm Springs in a production starring Hal Linden, the Tony- and Emmy-winning actor, best known for starring on the 1970s sitcom “Barney Miller.” The play won the Outstanding Original Writing Award in the staged reading category of the Desert Theatre League Awards.
The playwright, Charles Evered, an award-winning playwright and filmmaker, is a graduate of Yale School of Drama and a former naval officer. He has written screenplays for major studios and directed two features of his own. Evered also wrote for the hit TV shows Monk, starring Tony Shalhoub. Currently, he is Professor of Playwriting at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) where he served as the department’s first artistic director.
Evered says, “An Actor’s Carol is a comedy, but unlike other spoofs and satires of A Christmas Carol, it has heart and truth, particularly about theater.”
This production is directed by Sasha Bratt with set design by Dan Nischan, costumes by Lisa, and lighting by Marcus Abbott.
Michael Iannucci* will be returning to the Ivoryton Playhouse where he previously appeared in The Games Afoot and Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks, to take on the role of Hugh Pendleton/Scrooge. He will be joined by Lev Harvey, who was recently seen in Shear Madness, Alec Silberblatt* who was here for Biloxi Blues and Moira O’Sullivan who has appeared in Ivoryton in Biloxi Blues, Coney Island Christmas, and It’s A Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play.
Performance times are Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 7:30pm and Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday at 2pm.
Tickets are $35 adult / $32 senior / $20 student / $15 children under 12 and are available by calling the Playhouse box office at 860-767-7318 or by visiting our website at www.ivorytonplayhouse.org (Group rates and subscriptions are available by calling the box office for information.)
The Playhouse is located at 103 Main Street in Ivoryton.
*denotes member of Actors Equity