The most tried and true of old holiday friends is A Christmas Carol at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, back for its 20th year. It’s an excellent re-telling of Ebenezer Scrooge’s night with the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come performed on a miraculous set with turntables and trap doors, constantly moving and dazzling. If you’ve seen it before, you know it’s populated by many local actors who return year after year — some have been doing this show almost every holiday season for two decades.
The next week provides your final chances to see the Playhouse’s production of the Charles Dickens classic. It might seem a bit anticlimactic to attend this show after Christmas, but those performances could be your best bet to attend a show that traditionally sells most of its tickets well in advance.
You can be assured that the professionalism of the show will not be diminished by one snowflake: A Christmas Carol at the Playhouse is a beautiful and well-acted piece of theater, worth seeing for Bruce Cromer’s nuanced portrait of Ebenezer Scrooge who evolves from a penurious skinflint to a benevolent philanthropist. He’s funny as a grouch and even more amusing when he’s as “light as a feather” on Christmas morning.
But pay attention to the wonderful character actors, including Keith Jochim as the jolly Mr. Fezziwig as well as the ebullient and expansive Ghost of Christmas Present and especially Greg Procaccino who will scare your pants off as the morose Jacob Marley and then entertain you as creepy Old Joe, the junk dealer who buys the remnants of Scrooge’s life.
You can see them and many more twice daily on Wednesday and Thursday at 2 and 7 p.m.; no performances on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day (I guess Scrooge’s ghosts are busy those days). After Christmas, there are 7 p.m. performances through Dec. 30.
Read more of Rick Pender’s impressions of A Christmas Carol here. Find show times, buy tickets and get Playhouse details here.
This article appears in Dec 1-7, 2010.
