Welcome! We are grateful to have you with us today, whether your visit to see A Christmas Carol is an annual tradition for your family, or if you’re joining us for the first time. Unlike the shows in the theatre’s Broadway subscription series, A Christmas Carol is produced entirely under our roof, featuring a talented cast of performers from Boston and New York as well as the Worcester area. Those performers spend a month of their year here in Worcester, rehearsing and performing. Many return year after year to join our A Christmas Carol family, and our first day of rehearsal each year is like a homecoming. This year is no exception. Of thirty performers, twenty-one have been in the show before and some began last year. One, Laura DeGiacomo, has been in the show all eleven years since our inaugural production in 2008. Jeremy Lawrence, our Ebenezer Scrooge, has been at the heart of this production for seven years. It is only because we have so many cast members returning each year that we’re able to mount such a large and complex production in only two and a half weeks of rehearsal. Equally important, however, are those that join our cast for the first time, because their new energy helps to keep the show fresh and helps us to continue finding new connections and nuances in the story. Each year we choose one or more elements of the story to re-examine, and sometimes re-envision. If you’re among those that make our production a part of your holiday tradition, you may enjoy finding new things in the show each year. In this 2018 production we have re-envisioned the Spirit of Christmas Past, with Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl” as inspiration. Andersen was a contemporary to Dickens, and "The Little Match Girl" was first published in 1845, two years after "A Christmas Carol." In Andersen’s story, the poor match girl walks city streets shoeless in the snow, trying to sell matches and afraid to return home for fear her father will beat her for not selling enough. Suffering from the cold, she takes shelter in a corner between two houses and lights her matches, one by one, to keep warm. In each match she sees a lovely vision; starting with a warm stove, then a luxurious holiday feast, then a magnificent Christmas tree. As she lights another match she sees a vision of her grandmother, and to keep the vision alive for as long as she can, she lights the entire bundle of matches at once. After running out of matches, the poor child dies and her grandmother carries her soul to Heaven. The next morning, passers-by find the girl dead in the nook and feel pity for her, although they had not shown kindness to her before her death. It’s not hard to imagine an intersection between these two stories. The little match girl represents exactly what the Ghost of Jacob Marley means when he talks of the common welfare and the need for all persons to walk among their fellow men “and witness what [they] cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness.” The Ebenezer Scrooge we meet at the beginning of the story would almost certainly have been among those passers-by that did not show kindness to the match girl. We can hope that the man he has become by the end of his journey will stop to help the next little match girl he encounters. We live in a world where we encounter today’s equivalent of little match girls every day, and we are often as blind to them as Scrooge is to the need around him. As we all move through our world over the coming year, I hope that we will each find opportunities to show kindness where we can. Best wishes for a peaceful holiday season,
Troy Siebels Director of A Christmas Carol President and CEO, The Hanover Theatre and Conservatory for the Performing Arts
