Learning the language of A Christmas Carol
Open Door Theatre staging production of Christmas classic in Corner Brook
Open Door Theatre is bringing a holiday classic to the Corner Brook stage.
On Dec. 20, at the Corner Brook Arts and Culture Centre, the youth theatre and music group will present A Christmas Carol.
It is their first full length stage production since the school opened this past January.
“It’s been a real awesome year where we learned a whole lot, and this is the culmination of everything we’ve been doing,” artistic director Adam Brake told The West Coast Wire.
Brake and general manager Allison Crowe, who is directing the show, decided this summer they wanted to do A Christmas Carol.
“Allison and I are both a big fan of kind of ghostly things and horror stories, and I’ve always loved A Christmas Carol because it’s keeping with the tradition of Victorian times and the telling of a ghost story at Christmas,” explained Brake. “It’s this amazing Christmas story that just about everybody knows, but very few people think of it as a ghost story.”
The much-anticipated show is already sold out.
Featuring a cast of 37, including students from kindergarten to Grade 12, the show is a staging of Newfoundland artist Rory Lambert’s adaptation of the story.
Lambert’s version of the classic Christmas tale is set in a Newfoundland outport, sometime in the mid-20th century.
It reimagines Ebenezer Scrooge as a local merchant who owns a fishing premises alongside his now deceased business partner Jacob Marley.
“He’s the person in town who would hold all the money,” added Brake, who will play the old miser in the show.
According to Brake and Crowe, the Newfoundland dialect is prominent in the script.
All the roles — except for Brake as Scrooge and Craig Haley as Jacob Marley — are performed by students.
Rehearsals started in mid-November.
Brake and Crowe have found that even the younger students, who were previously unfamiliar with the story, have taken to the material.
It has been a joy for them to watch the students explore and enact the more emotional moments of the script.
“To see them dive in and do some real acting, to see them really try to hit these emotional moments and understand being in those people’s shoes, that’s a really exciting thing for me as their instructor,” explained Brake. “They’re there to have fun, but they also want to learn about this, and they want to have that experience of hitting those harder to do moments and those less good feeling moments.”
Crowe continued, “We were doing a rehearsal yesterday and we were going over the basic elements of the scene and one of the students asked, ‘What would my character have been doing before this?’ which is such an advance. It was pretty awesome to see them take to that quite naturally.”
The Newfoundland dialect in the script has presented a challenge to the young actors.
“A lot of the language is New found landed up, which is kind of a challenge for our kids, which we’re really enjoying,” Brake said with a laugh. “Which (is something) Allison and I are super proficient in, but our kids today are spending less and less time with that accent.”
Dialogue in the text is written phonetically.
“A couple of times we have to break it down a little bit,” explained Crowe. “There’s one line, that would be like, ‘Supper wasn’t that good, anyway' but it was written like ‘Supper wouldn’t that good anyway.’”
They explained to the students that “wouldn’t” means “wasn’t” in this context.
Brake and Crowe enjoy watching the kids embrace these cultural markers of Newfoundland.
“We have our own accent, our own regional dialects, our own stories, and to me that’s part of what makes Newfoundland such a cultural hotbed,” said Brake.
FIRST YEAR
A Christmas Carol is the culmination of an exciting first year for Open Door Theatre.
“We opened in January not knowing what to expect, but both of us have a good base in teaching young people, and we were both amazed at how excited folks were to learn about acting,” said Brake.
They’ve had students they previous taught at Theatre NL as well as completely new students.
Brake noted improvement over the course of these nearly 12 months.
Last spring, they introduced a breakfast theatre in partnership with the Hew and Draw, featuring three short stories written by Brake.
It went over so well that they plan to do it again next year.
In October, Open Door produced Radio Poe, a series of readings of Edgar Allan Poe stories.
That was a whole new kind of experience for the students.
“They were recording for the first time,” said Crowe.
They also introduced a film program this fall, led by Donovan Johnson.
“So, students can come to us and do a little bit of film production, and he’s a resource in this town,” explained Brake. “It’s about giving our young people access to working artists in this town, and we’re trying to do that as much as possible.”
Brake and Crowe were grateful for the community support they have received thus far.
Open Door offers separate acting classes for adults and youth.
Classes start on Jan. 15, but anyone is welcome to join any time.
For more information visit opendoortheatrecornerbrook.com.
“To see them dive in and do some real acting, to see them really try to hit these emotional moments and understand being in those people’s shoes, that’s a really exciting thing for me as their instructor.”
Adam Brake