{"id":6258,"date":"2016-12-09T07:38:43","date_gmt":"2016-12-09T12:38:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6258"},"modified":"2017-01-02T08:50:45","modified_gmt":"2017-01-02T13:50:45","slug":"a-childs-christmas-in-wales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6258","title":{"rendered":"A Child’s Christmas in Wales"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"A

John Ahlin & Greg Jackson; photo: Jerry Dalia.<\/p><\/div>\n

Every Christmas Eve our family reads out loud this beautiful Dylan Thomas<\/a> paean to the season, so I was excited to see the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey<\/a>\u2019s production (opening night 12\/3, through 1\/1). Several different stagings of this heartwarming story are now on stage in the New York-New Jersey-Philadelphia area.<\/p>\n

STNJ\u2019s is the early 1980\u2019s musical adaptation by Jeremy Brooks and Adrian Mitchell, which the theater has produced three times previously. Under the direction of Joseph Discher<\/a> and musical director Robert Long, the large cast plays multiple roles, keeps the story flowing, and the music and laughs coming.<\/p>\n

Set in Thomas\u2019s home town of Swansea, Wales, in the early 1900s when the author was a young boy, the story is simultaneously a celebration of small town childhood, family, and the season\u2019s simple delights. However, the events of the play are different from those of Thomas\u2019s original. No firefighting with snowballs in Mr. Prothero\u2019s parlor, no caroling with a ghostly ancient, no face-off with a sugarfagged contemporary.<\/p>\n

Instead, new scenes are created. When Dylan\u2019s mother incinerates the Christmas turkey in her new gas oven, Auntie Bessie miraculously produces a turkey dinner from the hotel (available because of the timely cancellation of a Christmas party that one suspects was also Auntie Bessie\u2019s doing). Brooks and Mitchell wrote new characters and many new lines to fit their expanded story and occasionally tried to replicate Thomas\u2019s lyricism. I wish they hadn\u2019t. \u201cThomas lite\u201d is risky.<\/p>\n

The aunts\u2014Auntie Bessie (played by Tess Ammerman), Auntie Nelllie (Clemmie Evans<\/a>), Auntie Hannah (Alison Weller), and Auntie Elieri (Carey Van Driest<\/a>) are charming, with great singing voices. And Uncle Gwyn (John Ahlin), dour Uncle Tudyr (Patrick Toon), and relentlessly political Uncle Glyn (Andy Paterson) are perfect comic types. Dylan\u2019s mother (Tina Stafford) is harried and musical, and his father (Peter Simon Hilton) delivers some of the poet\u2019s most memorable lines.<\/p>\n

Greg Jackson has a difficult challenge, playing both the adult and youthful Dylan. As an adult reminiscing about Christmases past, he\u2019s great, but he rarely seems like a child. Most kids are perpetual motion machines. It doesn\u2019t do to have him stand around, attentively listening while adults talk. He could sit, scratch his elbow, pull up his socks, retie his shoes, look distracted. When he\u2019s with his pals\u2014all also played by adults\u2014Jim (Thomas Daniels<\/a>), Jack (Julian Blake Gordon), and Tom (Seamus Mulcahy<\/a>), and they are larking about, he\u2019s perfectly believable. Jackson is a fine actor whom I\u2019ve admired in other STNJ plays, so this casting or direction is somehow off.<\/p>\n

That aside, the audience loved this production! While the Brooks\/Mitchell play is both more and less than Thomas\u2019s lyrical language and indelible images, you just have to go with it. It isn\u2019t a production for the head, but for the heart, and I found myself smiling and laughing along, and I hope you will too.<\/p>\n

For tickets, call the box office at 973-408-5600 or visit the box office online<\/a>. (Free tickets for kids 18 and younger.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every Christmas Eve our family reads out loud this beautiful Dylan Thomas paean to the season, so I was excited to see the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey\u2019s production (opening night 12\/3, through 1\/1). Several different stagings of this heartwarming … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"A Child's Christmas in Wales - Dylan Thomas's loving memoir on stage","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[118,104,147],"tags":[739,460,737,553,738],"class_list":["post-6258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memoir","category-the-morgue","category-theater","tag-a-childs-christmas-in-wales","tag-classic","tag-dylan-thomas","tag-shakespeare-theatre-of-new-jersey","tag-wales"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1CW","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6258"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6260,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6258\/revisions\/6260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}