If Christmas is all about nostalgia, then Stone Soup's current production billed as "A Child's Christmas in Wales" meets the criterion. It reminded me of my own turn on the stage when I was a fourth-grader and played a role in my school's Christmas pageant. The Stone Soup offering is at about the same level of professionalism as that fourth-grade play so long ago.
So my word of warning is this:
If you are the parent, relative or good friend of one of the child actors, you probably will like this. If not, avoid it!
Though the effort is billed and advertised as a professional production, it's really a recital by the children in Stone Soup's drama school. I should have read the press release more carefully. It did say "performers include our youth conservatory students and professional adult actors." I assumed that meant real actors with children filling in as the children who appear in the original Dylan Thomas literary work. That isn't the case.
Alas, I also assumed too much when the theater touted it as "A Child's Christmas in Wales - Adapted from the story by Dylan Thomas." If you love the Dylan Thomas prose poem, that's even more reason to stay away. The poor poet would have to be mind-numbingly drunk to endure this, and he was a writer known for his excessive use of alcohol.
And by the way, he died in 1953, not 1914 as the playbill mistakenly announces.
Thomas' Christmas poem, like his more famous "Under Milkwood," is highly regarded because of its lyrical language. His glorious words swirl around your head like the snowflakes that gently caress Swansea along the Welsh coast where Thomas spent his childhood.
It's a magical experience to hear the work read or recited well. It's made up of little vignettes - young boys playing in the snow and letting their imaginations run wild, old aunts and uncles who choose exactly the gifts a youngster doesn't want, the sweets, the treats, the joy, the poignancy of Christmas. It's old fashioned but so pertinent in its humor and the emotions it evokes.
The language is powerful, created by a great master. Thomas' own reading of the piece, available on Caedmon cassette offered by Harper Collins Publishers, is probably the best rendition of this extraordinary work.
Stone Soup has managed to mangle almost every one of his musical phrases. They are mumbled, eaten or misstated. This is not a piece easily mastered by youths with little stage experience. Certainly these young thespians are earnest, but they are in over their heads. Their rendition would be adequate in an elementary school gym or auditorium, with the K-5 students gathered around. It isn't theater for a paying public.
Except of course, if one of those little actors has your genes or plays on your T-ball team. And that brings me to the one element of the production that is tender. Looking around at the parents in the audience, seeing their eyes so filled with love, so filled with pride - well, even a Grinch has to be moved by that Christmas experience.
'A Child's Christmas in Wales'
Stone Soup Theatre,
4035 Stone Way N.
Friday-Sunday through Dec. 23.
Tickets: $10-$14,
stonesouptheatre.com
or 633-1883