I'm pleased to announce that my short play Burns Night has passed into the semifinalist round of the Holiday Playwright Contest held by Kinsman Quarterly.
The play premiered in 2019 at the Secret Theatre in Queens, which is now one of many companies doing productions of A Christmas Carol throughout the five boroughs of New York and beyond.
While I don't know that I'll be able to get out to see that production before it closes on December 22nd, I plan on going to see another production closer to home. On December 3rd and 4th, Sean Coffey will be performing his one-person adaptation of Charles Dickens's story at the historic Van Cortlandt House Museum in the Bronx.
John Kevin Jones will be performing his own one-person version of the tale in Manhattan at the Merchant’s House Museum in Manhattan through December 29th. If you're in the mood for a larger production, head over to Staten Island, where Sundog Theatre is producing a large-cast musical version of the tale on December 7th, adapted by Cash Tilton, with original songs by Susan Mondzak.
Most exciting to me, though, is a puppet version of A Christmas Carol performed by Drama of Works on December 19th at Rubulad in Brooklyn. Drama of Works founder Gretchen Van Lente is sponsoring a “XMAS CAROL” puppet slam, breaking up Dickens’s story into six parts, each performed by a different puppetry troupe. Gretchen designed the puppets for my own adaptation of the story in 2007, so I'm expecting great things.
Across the river, the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey is producing a stage version of A Christmas Carol in Madison, adapted by Neil Bartlett, which plays until December 29th. Yes, that's a lot of Carols! It so happens, I am regarded as enough of an expert on these things that I will be co-hosting the last episode of the Rosenbach Library's "Monsters and Ghosts" online program on December 16th, discussing the legacy of a Dickensian Christmas.
So however you celebrate this month, I wish you a very merry holiday season!
