ALT presents ‘The Best Christmas Pageant Ever’

The Herdman kids are the town terrors. They torched the firehouse when they were smoking cigars. They swear, drink jug wine and shoplift their way through the mall — and that’s just the beginning.

These juvenile delinquents attend Sunday school for the first time because they heard there were snacks. Then they bully their way into the lead roles in the Christmas pageant.

Barbara Robinson’s “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” opens at the Albuquerque Little Theatre on Dec. 8, running through Christmas Eve.

Turns out, the original play director breaks a leg, leaving the naive mom Grace Bradley in charge.

“They are described as the worst kids in the world,” said Art Tedesco, ALT director.

Scourge of the local school, the Herdman kids range in age from 8 to 12.

“There are six kids who are raised in a single parent household,” Tedesco said.

They have never been disciplined because their father abandoned them when they were babies and their mother is always working multiple shifts to make ends meet. Despite their terrible grades, the school steadily passes them because holding any one of them back would mean having two or more of them in the same grade.“They bully, they pick on kids, and they fight,” Tedesco said. “The oldest girl bullies her way into playing Mary.”

Imogene, the oldest, tells Alice, who also wants to play Mary, that she will stick a pussy willow into her ear and

watch it grow if she doesn’t drop out.

Eventually, their humanity emerges, appalled that the innkeeper forced a pregnant woman and her baby to sleep in a stable, and that the Holy Family fled King Herod, who wanted the baby Jesus killed.

“I considered it a fun little kids’ show,” Tedesco said. “But then I read the play and it was very moving to me.”

Robinson first published the story in McCall’s magazine before adapting it into a book in 1971. ABC turned it into a television movie in 1983.

“We sort of rediscover the Christmas story through them,” he continued. “It’s a very moving story to watch them learn about the birth of Christ and the weight that carries.”

Without her, the Herdman children would never have been given the chance to take part in the pageant. Without the lure of delicious snacks, the welfare-dependant Herdman kids would never have volunteered in the first place.