Business & Tech
The Rep: Help Make Our Christmas Wishes Come True!
'If you are able to purchase something off of our list as a gift to our staff, we'd be eternally grateful!'
December 10, 2020
Find out what's happening in Portsmouthfor free with the latest updates from Patch.
We're using our down time to make some theater improvements.
Two exciting projects (well, for our staff and performers it's exciting): we're giving a facelift to our Green Room and turning a conference area into a classroom for our Youth Apprentice Company members.
Find out what's happening in Portsmouthfor free with the latest updates from Patch.
Ok we lied, there's a third exciting project - the offices upstairs are currently engaging in office wars in who can create the most beautiful space.
We have some items on our wishlist that will help with this. If you are able to purchase something off of our list as a gift to our staff, we'd be eternally grateful!
We know, we know, we send out a lot of emails. To thank you for hanging in and not "unsubscribing" we'll be giving you prizes for being so great!
We're giving away a couple of $100 gift certificates to the Martingale Wharf to our email subscribers. We'll draw some winning names on Sunday and we'll contact winners on Monday. These gift certificates never expire and you can use them as some of holiday gifts if you so choose!
Fill out this form here. We only ask for your email and name, and that's it. Easy peasy.
(We know we have your email already if you're reading this, it just helps us get in touch with you if you're the winner!)
Honey's Holiday Happy Hour - LIVESTREAM
Dec 13, 2020 - Dec 26, 2020
SRT Livestream
Haul out the holly and celebrate the holidays with everyones favorite hostess, Honey Punch! Join Honey, her jazz cats and other special guests as they sing, dance, and slay their merry way through your favorite holiday classics! A night of merriment and spectacle that you shan’t soon forget! Honey’s Holiday Happy Hour is a full-length old fashioned television holiday special themed show that is available for both in-person performances and live-stream- so break out the hot cocoa and celebrate the Holidays with Honey Punch! As Honey says, we don’t get happy...we STAY happy!
Winter Wonderettes - LIVESTREAM
Nov 27, 2020 - Dec 19, 2020
SRT Livestream
The Wonderettes are back! This seasonal celebration finds the girls entertaining at Springfield High— in front of the set of the school play. When Santa turns up missing, the girls use their talent and creative ingenuity to save the holiday party. Featuring great ’60s versions of holiday classics such as “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town,” “Jingle Bell Rock,” “Run, Rudolph, Run,” and “Winter Wonderland,” the result is, of course, marvelous. This energetic and glittering holiday package is guaranteed to delight audiences of all ages.
Gift a Free Livestream Ticket to a Senior
For a gift of $26, we'll offer a free livestream to a Senior in our community. For a gift of $100 we'll offer four. Not only are you helping an isolated population during this difficult time, you're helping our theatre reach our fundraising goals for the year!
Sponsor an Empty Seat
The Seacoast Rep is running at 30% capacity. We have had to remove over 150 seats to ensure social distancing and to keep our staff, performers, and patrons safe. We've been turned down for Federal assistance, and we're turning to you for help. Please consider sponsoring an empty seat. We will print out a sign with your name on it and adhere it to the seat for our patrons, staff, performers, and board to see.
Christmas Carol is a Hit!
Check out the New York Times Review Below
The timeless tale of Ebenezer Scrooge comes to thrilling new life as Tony Award winner Jefferson Mays (I Am My Own Wife, Gentlemen’s Guide…) plays over 50 roles in a virtuosic, master class of a performance that must be seen to be believed. This theatrical achievement comes from the haunting vision of one of Broadway’s most imaginative directors, Michael Arden (Tony-winning Best Revival – Once on this Island).
Check out the NYT Review:
"Charles Dickens knew how to sell “A Christmas Carol.” For years, he even took it on tour.
Consider his sold-out appearance, on Dec. 9, 1867, at Steinway Hall on 14th Street in Manhattan, where he kept the audience rapt for 90 minutes as he read his 1843 novella aloud. With a variety of voices, faces he’d practiced in front of a mirror in Boston and, as The New York Times reported, a “free use of gesticulation,” he wowed the crowd with the tale of greed and redemption.
Though Dickens did not have the benefit of modern technology, just a customized rostrum, the same handcrafted spirit is summoned by the astonishing Jefferson Mays in a live-capture “Christmas Carol” stuffed with every trick and whiz-bang available. He plays not only Scrooge, Tiny Tim and various ghosts but also, in Michael Arden’s riveting film rendering, “the dying fire” and “an indignant potato.”
It should, and not just because the film, streamable through Jan. 3, is vastly effective as spooky entertainment. (It may even be too intense for some children.) Based on Dickens’s touring version of the tale, itself slightly altered from the printed text, this “Christmas Carol” is the most fearsome I’ve seen — I mean morally fearsome. It is thus the most faithful to a story that is not merely about the miserliness of one man, but, potentially, of all mankind.
So although there is plenty of ham here, starting with Mays’s snarling, paranoid Scrooge, whose lower lip hangs down to the left as if to provide an exit ramp for his bile, there is almost no honey glaze to sweeten it. Most “Christmas Carol” adaptations depend on that honey, just as theater companies that produce them each November depend on ticket sales generated by a familiar, “beloved” work they can market as family entertainment to finance the rest of their seasons. Even the impressive production from the Old Vic in London, streaming Dec. 12-24, makes the story as festive as it can, often by pelting it with food and music.
Not so with this version, adapted by Mays and Arden and Susan Lyons and conceived by Arden and the set designer Dane Laffrey. For one thing, it insists on emphasizing the act of storytelling, whether Mays is reciting the text as a lively but neutral narrator or portraying, seemingly simultaneously, all the characters in a scene.
As he demonstrated in “I Am My Own Wife” and “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder,” Mays is an astonishing quick-change artist. A heartier timbre gives us Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, in a flash; a flinging of hands makes an excitable child.
The drama is occasionally fleshed out with animations and recorded elements rendered on LED tiles built into the set.
The drama is occasionally fleshed out with animations and recorded elements rendered on LED tiles built into the set.Credit...via A Christmas Carol Live
Yet however delightful it is to see Mays nail, in just one look or intonation, the essence of a vegetable knocking “loudly at the saucepan-lid to be let out and peeled,” as Dickens described that potato, this is not just a tour de force. The production, based on one Arden directed in 2018 for the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, aims to reproduce what the novelist clearly intended his own readings to be: an opportunity to make what was already a classic story feel new, while also making it feel as if it should matter forever.
Even in the spiritual world, it takes just a shift of color from the lighting designer Ben Stanton and some increased reverb from the sound designer Joshua D. Reid to complete Mays’s leap from tormentor to tormented in Scrooge’s confrontations with Marley’s ghost. The other ghosts are rendered with similarly effective theatrical illusions, including shadows and puppetry by James Ortiz.
And though the drama is occasionally fleshed out with animations and recorded elements rendered on LED tiles built into the set — the haunting projection design is by Lucy Mackinnon — they retain a preindustrial aesthetic. Even the filmed figures seen attending a Christmas dance in Scrooge’s memory are kept upstage and deliberately blurry, their merriment generalized into distant hubbub. Mays remains always the most special effect.
That suits the subject. Filmed live but with no audience on Oct. 28 at United Palace in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood, this “Christmas Carol” uses theatricality as a metaphor for engagement in the lives of others; the auditorium, emptied by pandemic precautions, stands in well for Scrooge’s unpeopled heart. As scenes of other households’ happiness disappear on a turntable or vanish into the flies, he remains onstage for the entire 90 minutes, with only hints of a back story to explain his omnipresent awfulness.
It is actually one of the problems with “A Christmas Carol,” when adapted as drama, that Scrooge and his transformation are so thinly motivated: He is a horrible human until he gets freaked by a bad night’s sleep, at which point he turns into a completely lovely one.
Some have discerned in this an allegory for the unearned grace of Christian redemption, but Mays and Arden suggest a more relevant interpretation. Dickens doesn’t give Scrooge any normal psychology, they demonstrate, because the man, like the newly industrial society he profits from, does not need it. His greed is hard-wired, a genetic inheritance, a prehuman trait that this human has turned into a rage for power.Staged exclusively for this production and captured live with breathtaking clarity, this must-watch streaming event conjures the powerful spirits of Christmas and brings all the magic of live theatre home for the holidays.
But not just one human. Perhaps unavoidably in our day, this “Christmas Carol” takes every opportunity to underline Dickens’s disapproval of a world that not only allows but is organized to require extreme inequality. (Dickens himself spent part of his boyhood working in a dismal boot polish factory when his father was sentenced to prison for debt.) Mays follows the money, never letting us forget that structural poverty makes misers of everyone. The Cratchits’ Christmas goose is admired for its tenderness, flavor and size but also, Mays emphasizes with an odd turn of voice, its “cheapness.”
Well, don’t let all that scare you too much. There are comic and musical moments throughout — albeit the fleeting comedy of ironic observation and the melancholy music of Sufjan Stevens singing carols. And we do get Dickens’s completely jolly ending.
But make no mistake, this is a production that understands “A Christmas Carol” as a work of protest no less than “Oliver Twist” and “Bleak House.” The question it raises isn’t whether Scrooge can be salvaged by an evening’s theatrics, but whether we can." - Jesse Greene, New York Times
A Christmas Carol is available for unlimited viewings within a 24-hour period. You can even gift it for someone to watch!
$20 of every ticket will benefit the Seacoast Rep.
Livestream packages are now available!
COVID-19 got you worried? Enjoy our shows from home. Subscribe from now until December 31st and receive 20% off off of your tickets, no ticking fees, and receive one free ticket to any Sol Series Mainstage livestream, Teen Mainstage livestream, or a Red Light Mainstage livestream.
(your free ticket will be arranged with you at a later date with our box office))
2021 Livestream Package
Enjoy 20% off of your livestream tickets and no ticketing fees! Choose between 4 - 9 livestreams for your discount.
Choose 5 of 9
Winter Wonderettes - LIVESTREAM Nov 27, 2020 - Dec 19, 2020
Honey's Holiday Happy Hour - LIVESTREAM Dec 13, 2020 - Dec 26, 2020
Stokely & Martin | Nevaeh's Brother LIVESTREAM Jan 29, 2021 - Mar 21, 2021
The Fantastiks LIVESTREAM Feb 12, 2021 - Mar 27, 2021
Godspell LIVESTREAM Apr 16, 2021 - May 30, 2021
Pippin LIVESTREAM Jun 11, 2021 - Jul 17, 2021
Jekyll & Hyde LIVESTREAM Sep 17, 2021 - Nov 06, 2021
Peter Pan LIVESTREAM Nov 19, 2021 - Dec 22, 2021
The Little Prince - LIVESTREAM Dec 19, 2021 - Dec 30, 2021
It's a time for giving! We're pleased to be offering another year of Give The Gift of Theatre. This package includes a certificate for two tickets to any show, plus two drink tickets for $60-$75 - a huge savings. The certificate never expires, and can be transferred to anyone you like! We'll even ship it.
Find us just a few blocks from the theater, at 99 Bow Street, Suite W. Some say hard to find, all say well worth it!
Check out our website martingalewharf.com for menus and hours. 603.431.0901
Seacoast Repertory Theatre uses Vendini for ticketing, marketing, and box office management
Seacoast Repertory Theatre - 125 Bow Street, Portsmouth, NH, (603) 433-4472
Vendini, Inc. - 55 Francisco Street, Suite 350, San Francisco, CA, +1 (800) 901-7173
This press release was produced by the Chamber Collaborative of Greater Portsmouth. The views expressed are the author's own.
