High wear, rage 12

New treatment at Play House

High-spirited "Christmas Carol"

By R. Woodward

This year's production of A Christmas at the Cleveland, Play House (running through January 3) is basically the same production the Play House presented last year which means that it has as much originality and emotional impact as any live stage presentation of Dickens' story you have probably ever had a chance to see.

With a playing time of about an hour and a half (presented without an intermission), the play is briskly paced with no sign of padding (except in Mrs. Fezziwig's bodice).

Directed by William Rhys from a script by Doris Baizley, the production manages to turn all of the story's serious emotions on the audience full blast while letting the cast make the most of humorous aspects of how the various characters think and act.

The encounter between Scrooge and Marley's admonishing ghost, for example, is an unusually potent combination of hilarity and genuine scariness, as a disgruntled Marley lets Scrooge have it in response to Scrooge's suggestion that he is only a delusion caused by indigestion.

Playing Marley's ghost, Morgan Lund produces an agonized, booming voice that is So overpowering one wishes that Lund could be smuggled full costome past White House guards into the sleeping chamber of the Reagans.

The play opens with a group of dancing, skipping, tumbling, and pratfalling players converging on the stage from various, corners of the auditorium to represent a

traveling acting troup just arriving in town to put on a production of A Christmas Carol.

They are scowled at by the cranky and parsimonious stage manager who has just been seen bawling out the company prop boy for not being able to find Marley's chain.

Against his own better judgement, the manager is obliged to let the young man act in the show since he has just fired Tiny Tim for eating one of the show's key props (the Cratchets' Christmas dinner).

Idaho, from the company's Scrooge, announcing he has retired from the stage to become a potato farmer. The high spirited players persuade the manager to save the company's finances by taking the part of Scrooge himself.

A letter arrives from Boise,

In the Manager-Scrooge role, 34 year-old Wayne Turney gives a performance that is very persuasive and very exhilerating. Turney is so sharp-eyed and sharp-eared and has his voice and body so well trained that his various ideas for. getting his two characters across never come off as anything less than completely. realized.

directions very intelligently. No Turney seems to take actor does everything perfectly, and for a performance to be this vital without any obvious rough edges Turney must have been able to follow precise, difficult, and perhaps even ruthless

criticism from director William

Rhys without losing his enthusiasm.

··

One unforgetable bit of business is Turney's transformation from the manager into the manager as Scrooge.

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Turney appears to age about 40 years as members of the troupe apply a half-dozen dabs of grease paint to his face in full sight of the audience. As the manager begins to walk backstage so that the play can begin Turney shows the manager's brisk gait transformed into an old man's hobbling shuffle, raising the effect from the perfect to the sublime by showing the manager momentarily startled as if realizing tht the grease paint has bewitched him into a strange body.

The encounter between Scrooge and the Spirit of Christmas past is more poignant than most other productions have made it. Carolyn Reed does not play the spirit as a light, innocent, and airy being as it is usually played, but as a somber, deeply emotional being who all but demands that Scrooge immediately begin to weep for the lost opportunities of his early life.

Beaming eagerness and looks of wide eyed wonder, Allan Byrne as the stage-struck prop boy who steps in as Tiny Tim does a great deal to help the

audience get into the spirit of the production.

Byrne is not very tiny, being about 25 years old and as tall as the actor playing Scrooge. (This production does not show Scrooge carrying Tiny Tim on his shoulders.) But the main point is that the production within the production is supposed to be somewhat incongruous in external details

with the enthusiasm of the traveling players firing the imaginations of audience members and the true spirit of the Dickens story being. conveyed regardless.

Tiny Tims's famous line "God bless us everyone" is a line which every Christmas Carol is obliged to contain even though it is usually an embarassment. In this production the stage-struck prop boy is shown being tickeled with himself at getting all the words out correctly and being generously applauded by his well-wishing fellow thespians.

For once a context and an actor have been found which make the line actually as delightful as it is supposed to be.

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