The past 17 years, more than 400,000 people have flocked to the Denver Performing Arts Complex to watch seasonal curmudgeon Ebenezer Scrooge have the bile scared out of him by so many dozens of ghosts, they could throw a Casper convention.
“A Christmas Carol” is perennially the most-attended play of any Denver Center Theatre Company season. This year, more than 28,000 will again open up their Tiny Tim hearts to the rejuvenation of spirit that comes each winter solstice. That’s a lot of happy tickers.
But in a metro area of more than 2 million, you can only imagine how many of the coal variety have just two words for Charles Dickens and his fancy-footed Fezziwig: Bah Humbug.
C’mon, some of us want to have a laugh in December. Even if it’s the mean-spirited kind.
This year, DCTC artistic director Kent Thompson is counter-programming against his own box-office juggernaut with the hope of welcoming all those cynics who prefer a little more bite in their holiday eggnog.
Thompson is presenting both “A Christmas Carol” and “Season’s Greetings” simultaneously in a move his own Scrooge, Philip Pleasants, says – with a rolling r – “can only be described as a strrrrroke … of genius.”
The play, never before produced in Colorado, opened Friday having already sold nearly 90 percent of available seats, marketing director Jeff Hovorka said.
“Season’s Greetings” is a witty and acerbic domestic comedy by prolific playwright Alan Ayckbourn. It’s the story of a boozy British middle-class family whose members are so oversexed and fractious, their holidays degenerate into a series of increasingly outlandish calamities.
Kind of like all our family get-togethers.
“It’s the antidote to ‘A Christmas Carol,”‘ British-born director Gavin Cameron-Webb said with a hearty chuckle. “It’s always good to have choice. This country thrives on it. And believe it or not, I think there are people who don’t particularly care for ‘A Christmas Carol.”‘
Gee, do you think?
“Now I can’t imagine who,” he said with a caustic laugh. “Must be people who are not sentimentally inclined, I would say.”
Ayckbourn is the most produced playwright in the world behind Shakespeare, but you’d never know it here in Colorado, where just one of his 65 plays has been presented in the past six years, the Aurora Fox’s “Comic Potential” in 2003.
In an interview before that staging, Ayckbourn said he just wants to keep theatergoing fun.
“Theater has tended to get a rather stern image of late – taking upon itself the job of telling us where we’re all going wrong, or pointing out to us that it’s a terrible world, and stop looking so smug, etc.,” Ayckbourn said. “And yes, I think that’s the theater’s job, as well, but it would be sad if the other side of it was totally abandoned.”
Ayckbourn’s plays are more like abandonment. In “Season’s Greetings,” Aunt Phyllis is soused, Bernard stages an endless and aggravating puppet show and there’s an illicit affair under the Christmas tree.
“He’s so funny because he shows people at their worst,” said the DCTC’s Thompson. “I love this play because we all want our holidays to go well but, you know, they don’t.”
Ayckbourn has described his take on comedy as “tragedy interrupted at the wrong point. You can make anything funny – provided you don’t go on too far.”
Despite Ayckbourn’s popularity, critic Michael Billington thinks the Brit is seriously underrated. In his book, “Alan
Ayckbourn,” Billington wrote: “He is constantly written about as if he were a boulevard lightweight, whereas he shows an increasing capacity to handle the darker side of human nature, while retaining his technical adventurousness … with a constantly varying comic format.”
Cameron-Webb also directed the American premiere of Ayckbourn’s “Things We Do for Love,” and met the playwright in London before staging his ambitious “Man of the Moment.”
“I have been an admirer of his work for some time,” said Cameron-Webb. “I found him to be very down to earth, very accessible, and a man completely without pretensions.”
Cameron-Webb, who makes his DCTC debut with the play, is also a longtime director at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival and last summer helmed “As You Like It” there. But he freely admits to being lesser- known than his wife, the esteemed director Jane Page. “Oh I’m sure that’s true,” Webb said, “Absolutely right, and no offense taken.”
The two met in Kansas City and fell in love with Colorado in 1980 when both worked for the Shakespeare festival. But they are globetrotters. This year alone, Webb has directed at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival and in Cairo, Boulder and Denver. Page has helmed “She Stoops to Conquer” in Baton Rouge, La.; The Arvada Center’s “Over the Tavern”; and is now directing “Tartuffe” for the Two River Theatre Company in Red Bank, N.J.
“It works because we have a three-week rule,” Cameron- Webb said. “We have to see each other at least once every three weeks.”
While Page is away, Cameroon-Webb will play, thanks to Thompson’s willingness to let him have a little fun.
“I think picking this play sheds Kent in a very wise light,” Cameron-Webb said. “It says that while he certainly recognizes the importance of the tradition of ‘A Christmas Carol’ to this community, it says he also recognizes that there are people who, the last thing they want to do is go and see ‘A Christmas Carol.”‘
God bless us, everyone.
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
