WORLD PREMIERE HOLIDAY REVUE
CHRISTMAS AS WE GROW OLDER
CONTINUES CITY LIT’S 27TH SEASON
The world premiere of Christmas as We Grow Older, a revue of stories, songs and other holiday writings adapted and directed by City Lit artistic director Terry McCabe, will begin previews at City Lit Theater on Friday, November 17 and open on Monday, November 20. The production runs through December 24.
“Christmas as We Grow Older is a Christmas revue for grownups,” stated McCabe. “It is neither about Frosty and Rudolph nor is it cynical or post-modern about the holiday. It brings together stories and prose pieces by classic writers such as Twain, Ferber, and Wodehouse, plus half a dozen songs from the 1620s through the 1980s, including the Chicago public performance premiere of a long-lost 1917 Jerome Kern piece, ‘A Jazz Christmas Carol,’ all exploring various adult perspectives on Christmas.”
The revue takes its title from a Charles Dickens piece included in the evening, “What Christmas Is as We Grow Older,” in which Dickens poses the question of what secular value Christmas has for us once we have outgrown the magic we believed in as children. Once the world has broken our hearts as it must do, Dickens asks, is Christmas merely a time of nostalgia for our lost innocence? “One way or another,” McCabe says, “every piece in the show is a different part of the answer to Dickens’s question.”
The cast for Christmas as We Grow Older is Kingsley Day, Melanie Esplin, Darrelyn Marx and Thomas M. Shea, who also accompany themselves and each other on piano, guitar, autoharp, flute, accordian and percussion. Music director is Dan Robinson. Lighting design is by Jacob Snodgrass.
The stories and other Christmas prose pieces included in Christmas as We Grow Older are, in addition to the Dickens piece:
“A Christmas Wish,” a letter to the editor by Mark Twain, singling one person out to exclude from the blessings of the joyous season;
“Catching Up with Christmas,” an Edna Ferber short story about a woman who has reason to feel she’s being left behind by the holiday;
“Just What I Wanted,” a comic essay by P. G. Wodehouse about gift-giving;
“Back for Christmas,” a Christmas episode of the 1940s radio drama series Suspense, a script by old time radio ace Robert Tallman based on a story by Edgar Award-winning short story writer John Collier;
“A Christmas Sermon,” a piece by Robert Louis Stevenson that is precisely what the title says it is;
“Claus Discovers Humanity” by L. Frank Baum, in which a young man’s direction in life is set; and
“The Gift of the Magi” by O. Henry, the greatest American Christmas story.
The songs in the revue are:
“Drive the Cold Winter Away,” a broadside ballad hit from 17th Century London;
“I Remember Christmas,” by cast member (and award-winning Chicago musical theatre composer) Kingsley Day, a beautiful companion piece to the Dickens essay;
“Christmas Time Seems Years and Years Away,” a charmer from 1909 by the then-unknown Irving Berlin and his partner Ted Snyder;
“A Jazz Christmas Carol,” Jerome Kern’s ragtime arrangement of “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen,” published in 1917 but never performed publicly during his lifetime, and unearthed in 1996 by Boston cabaret artists Ben Sears and Brad Conner, who were kind enough to share the sheet music with City Lit;
“The One-Horse Open Sleigh” by James Pierpont, the original (from 1857) version of “Jingle Bells,” with a different melody on the chorus than the one that most of us are used to hearing, and an unfamiliar verse or two;
“Miss Fogarty’s Christmas Cake,” a 19th-Century comic Irish song by Pennsylvania Dutch songwriter C. Frank Horn, about a fruitcake that “could kill a man twice after eating a slice;” and
“What Did Eve Give Adam for Christmas?” by Henry Lewis, Henry Creamer and J. Turner Layton, a vaudeville number by the songwriters of the immortal “After You’ve Gone” and “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans.”
Kingsley Day played 16 cameo roles as pianist/music director for Theatre Wit’s Two for the Show at Theatre Building Chicago. Other recent performing credits include the Preacher in 110 in the Shade with Light Opera Works, Governor Slaton in Bailiwick’s Parade at the Mercury Theater, Emperor Joseph II in Amadeus for Porchlight, Senator Barney in Pinafore! at Bailiwick, and various Gilbert & Sullivan patter roles (most recently the Lord Chancellor in Iolanthe) with the Savoyaires, who produced his version of Thespis, Gilbert and Sullivan’s “lost” operetta, two years ago. His play Tour de Farce was produced this year at New Jersey Rep and Montana’s Bigfork Summer Playhouse. Kingsley is also the composer-lyricist of the multi-Jeff-winning musical Summer Stock Murder and a thrice-Jeff-nominated musical director/pianist with credits that include Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh! and Always...Patsy Cline at the Apollo Theater.
Melanie Esplin has appeared in many City Lit shows, including P. G. Wodehouse’s Pigs Have Wings and Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer. She is currently the Local Coordinator for the 365Days/365Plays Festival - a year of free theatre in Chicago! As an actress the companies of Provision, Lifeline, Noble Fool, European Repertory, A Crew of Patches, Striding Lion and HealthWorks Theatre Company have featured in her recent past.
Darrelyn Marx makes her City Lit debut with this show. She won a Jeff Citation for Outstanding Supporting Performance in a Musical in Circle Theatre's Jane Eyre. She most recently appeared in Light Opera Works production of 110 in the Shade and as Clairee in Steel Magnolias at The Metropolis. Other Chicago credits include Apple Tree Theatre's A Man of No Importance and Provision Theatre’s production of A Christmas Carol.
Thomas M. Shea was last seen at City Lit in the Moliere one-acts The Doctor in Spite of Himself and The Pretentious Young Ladies. He also acted in several of City Lit’s Wodehouse adaptations, a Barthelme, and as Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer. This past year saw Tom in Urinetown at the Mercury Theatre and in Fiorello! at TimeLine, as well as reading for City Lit's "Books on the Chopping Block," in partnership with the American Library Association, for Banned Books Week. He is the author of a book, Broadway's Most Wanted.
Dan Robinson has worked in musical theatre, on and off, for over 40 years. Locally, heis particularly identified with Gilbert and Sullivan, having served as the Savoyaires’s music director for the last 10 years. A graduate of Harvard and Stanford, his musical life includes church music direction at St. John Cantius in Chicago, the home of the Latin Mass in Chicago, and as director of the Great Lakes Dredge and Philharmonic Society, a male chorus devoted to Christmas music and moderate drinking. He recently led a performance of J.S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion, only the second time the work has been performed locally on Early Instruments, and was seen and heard this October on EWTV providing Mozart church music for a service for the World Apostolate of Fatima.
Terry McCabe has been City Lit’s artistic director since February 2005. Most recently here he directed the world premieres of Frank Galati’s adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and of Holmes and Watson, his own adaptation of two Arthur Conan Doyle short stories, “A Scandal in Bohemia” and “The Final Problem.” He is the author of Mis-Directing the Play, used in college theatre courses from coast to coast, as well as an artistic associate of BoarsHead Theatre in Lansing, Michigan, and a theatre faculty member at Columbia College Chicago.
Christmas as We Grow Older will play Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00 PM and Sundays at 3:00 PM, November 17 through December 24. Press opening is Monday, November 20 at 7:00 PM. Ticket prices are $18.00 for the weekend of previews November 17-19, and $25.00 after opening. Discounts are available for seniors, students and groups of ten or more. Tickets can be reserved by going to www.citylit.org or by calling (773) 293-3682.
City Lit’s production of Christmas as We Grow Older is the second production of its twenty-seventh season. City Lit specializes in literate theatre, including stage adaptations of literary material.
City Lit is located in the historic Edgewater Presbyterian Church building at 1020 West Bryn Mawr Avenue, one block west of Sheridan Road and two blocks east of the Bryn Mawr Red Line L stop. Valet parking, and discounted self-service parking, are available for theatre customers.