‘An Improvised Christmas Carol’ deconstructs Dickens
Marley’s dead, but not much else is certain about “An Improvised Christmas Carol,” Sea Tea Comedy Theater’s holiday comedy staple. Never the same twice, the show’s been brought back for a two-week run, through Dec. 19, after a year off due to the COVID shutdown.
The cast is not at all rusty from not having redone Dickens in a while. They’re merry and bright. Or just go ahead of think of better words for what they are, since that’s what “An Improvised Christmas Carol” is all about.
The audience controls this show before it starts. This is not one of those improv nights where the action freezes every five minutes and someone essentially shouts “Tell us what to do now.” This is the Mad-libs kind of improv, where a member of the cast asks for about 20 scene-setting words or phrases. Among them: a business. A movie style. An emotion. A funny swearword. “Something a boss would never say.” You know the drill. The process can get rather tedious, but there’s also some fun in audience members trying to out-clever each other.
Once the list is filled, you get to sit back and watch an uninterrupted hour-long “Christmas Carol” where, say, Tiny Tim has bronchitis, the Ghost of Christmas Present speaks in Dr. Seuss-style rhymes, and Ebnezer Scrooge is getting badgered to contribute to the United Ferret College Fund.
Thanks to modern miracle of microphones, the cast hears all the suggestions backstage as they’re first being suggested, and they rush out ready to go with no pause for a creative huddle. The objective is to tell a coherent, dramatic “Christmas Carol” while maneuvering all the odd stylistic and semantic obstacles they’ve placed in their own way. They succeed.
The same local cast has been doing the show in Hartford for years, adding their own twists to a framework first developed by an improv theater in Seattle in the mid-1980s.
Kevin Macdermott, who has been the sole Scrooge in every season of “An Improvised Christmas Carol” thus far, prowls the stage like a stand-up comedian provocateur, ranting about truly random issues like (the Thursday suggestion) ferret charities. He’s skilled at slyly introducing a new concept into a scene so it hits you gradually that it’s one of the audience suggestions. That’s where some of the show’s biggest laughs come from. On Thursday, one of the pre-show requests was for “a place to live,” and the answer was “mom’s basement,” but it wasn’t until Macdermott entered a scene screaming “Moooommmmm!” that it was clear that the basement was the miser’s own dwelling. Then an offstage Mom screamed back about what she’d made for dinner. Funny.
Some suggestions have much more power than others. On Thursday, Scrooge’s place of business was a cannabis dispensary, which meant stoner jokes all night long.
An awful lot of plain old non-improvised acting is also involved here, especially for the Scrooge character, who must ultimately get redeemed (or not — staying stingy is an option the audience can vote on). Whole lines of Dickens, like that surefire laugh-getter “If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population,” are delivered unimprovised. “Bah, Humbug!” does not get off so easy.
The show’s done without sets, without props and without costumes. The cast is in street clothes, sitting or standing on black rehearsal blocks and miming whatever objects they need. Experimental theater styles and neo-realism blend with a frantic comic retelling of a classic.
There are seven people in the cast of “An Improvised Christmas Carol,” of whom only six perform on any given night. The odd person out of Thursday was Greg Ludovici, Sea Tea Comedy Theater’s artistic director. (There’s another valuable unseen member of the company who works every night, tech director Nate Gagnon.) Except for Macdermott as Scrooge, the actors freely switch up the main roles from night to night. If a performer has a special comic gift, they’re allowed room to use it. Dan Russell is adept at long winding deadpan stories which he attaches to phrases suggested by an audience, who is so caught up in wondering “Where is he going with this?” that when the punchline arrives it’s uproarious. Bryan Thurston is splendid at interrupting with funny noises. Casey Grambo is a warm graceful presence, a comically calming presence for when things might be getting shouty elsewhere on stage. Matt Saccullo has the ability to elevate someone’s else joke concept with a just-as-funny follow-up.
The show’s director and producer (through her Hot Cocco Productions), Claire Zick, solicited all the variables from the audience at the outset of the show and otherwise took on a host of small roles. There’s an art to that too — not upstaging others, keeping a steady pace and tone. At Thursday’s show, they acknowledged there were children in the audience, nixed one of the more salacious audience suggestions, and shifted as one into non-offensive mode. Other nights, they could get dirtier.
There are precious, show-offy elements to any improv show, but a well-oiled ensemble can be a wonder to behold. This one gets quite physical, dancing or jumping on blocks, but mostly it’s a pleasure to watch their agile minds at work, figuring out collectively onstage, through dialogue, how to get Scrooge from, for example, his mom’s basement to a Rusted Root concert with as many cool jokes as possible.
“An Improvised Christmas Carol” isn’t the only unpredictable holiday special on the Sea Tea Comedy Theater schedule. “Hark! The Harold Angels Sing: A 100% Made-up Christmas Musical” happens Dec. 20 at 7 p.m. Other upcoming events include a reunion of the scene-based local female improv troupe Romantic Baby Dec. 18 at 10 p.m.
”An Improvised Christmas Carol” runs through Dec. 19 at Sea Tea Comedy Theater, 15 Asylum Street, Hartford. Performances are Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. $18, $10 children. seateaimprov.com.