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An antidote to sugarplum treacle
Lantern’s ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ (1st review)
Gary L. Day
I avoid Christmas shows like the plague. If I must sit through yet another Dickens adaptation or anything involving a sugarplum fairy or another bad Santa movie or anything involving precocious, smartass kids, I might become homicidal. Why in the world, then, would I subject myself to something called A Child’s Christmas in Wales?
For a couple of reasons. First, it sounded like it might actually be something different, as opposed to a rehash or a repeat. Second, it’s by the Lantern Theater Company, whose work I’ve respected for years.
Child’s Christmas is adapted from a 1952 recording made by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. As adapted for the stage by Charles McMahon and Sebastienne Mundheim, Child’s Christmas was indeed quite different from other “holiday fun for the whole family” productions foisted on us during this season.
Puppet as child
When you enter the theater, the first thing you see is the stage covered with white plastic sheets and festooned all around and up above with white plastic inflated balls. It reminded me of the cheap plastic sets on an Irwin Allen sci-fi TV series of the 1960s. But then the music kicks in, the play begins and a startling transformation starts to take hold.
A Child’s Christmas isn’t actually a play— it lacks any cohesive plotline or distinct characters. It’s a series of memories: scenes of Christmas in the Wales of Dylan Thomas’s childhood, as perceived through the eyes of that child, portrayed onstage by a puppet. The four live performers don’t play roles per se or recite dialogue. One of them narrates the memories, and all of them help transform the stage into a series of magical moments.
Sound and light
McMahon and Mundheim clearly understand that the best special effect is an audience’s imagination, and they engage it to the fullest. Dylan Thomas’s words are powerful and delicately evocative; I can see where certain modern prose stylists like Ray Bradbury and Neil Gaiman got some of their inspiration. In sublime support of Thomas’s words were lighting designer Shon Causer and sound designer/original composer Robert Kaplowitz.
A Child’s Christmas in Wales is a Christmas show for people like me who hate Christmas shows, but who love stage enchantment without cliché or trite sentimentality. Do yourself a favor and recapture some of the innocent magic of childhood as displayed by this wonderful piece of work.
To read another review by Jake Blumgart, click here.
What, When, Where
A Child’s Christmas in Wales. By Dylan Thomas, co-created by Charles McMahon and Sebastienne Mundheim; Mundheim directed. Lantern Theater production through January 5, 2014 at St. Stephen’s Theater, 923 Ludlow St. (215) 829-0395 or www.lanterntheater.org.
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