The Sapulpa Community Theatre (124 S. Water Street) has sold its last ticket for the highly-anticipated Christmas play, “A Dickens’ Christmas Carol.”
It’s a welcome announcement to a cast that rehearsed several times a week for months to nail the complicated plot and make it a memorable experience for the hundreds of attendees.
It’s also something of a relief to a theatre board that wasn’t sure this show would garner the fantastic turnout they were hoping for.
Kerry Kavanaugh, a member of the theatre’s board of directors, and also a key member of the marketing committee, didn’t hide her uncertainty in a recent group chat to the rest of the marketing committee about the lackluster ticket sales. “It’s a little light,” she said at the time. The show was less than three weeks from opening and not a single one of the show’s six performances was fully-booked, though some were more than halfway there.
Thankfully, the tide began to turn closer to the show’s arrival, and by the time the curtains opened for the first performance, the show was sold out for all but one. A few hours later, online ordering closed for good on all shows—and the reviews were rolling in: it was a smash hit.
The show sounds like a traditional rendition of the Charles Dickens’s classic Christmas story, and it is…sort of.
Categorized as a “play-within-a-play,” the show is actually a look at what a tired theatre troupe might do if forced to play the real Christmas Carol for fifteen straight years, each one promising to be their last.
The lead actress decides that she’s had enough and feigns sickness on the day of the performance, believing the show will surely be canceled without it’s starring actress.
But as the old saying goes, “the show must go on,” and it does, if not particularly well. Midway through the first act, the “sick” actress shows up in curlers, aghast that the show is indeed going on without her. Hilarity ensues as she attempts to steal the show back from an anxious understudy who is more than ready to fight for the part she’s waited so long for.
The Sapulpa Herald attended the opening night and the response was ecstatic. The roaring laughter of the audience could surely be heard outside the auditorium, if not down the block at the nearby Christmas Chute. At intermission, one attendee said what we were all feeling: “my sides and face hurt from laughing so much.”
In an especially fortuitous turn of events, the writer of the play, Mark Landon Smith, heard that the show was happening and drove two hours from his home in Arkansas to be a part of the opening night. He was so impressed with the portrayal that he told director Chuck Osuna “you guys can have the rights to perform any of my shows.” Smith has written 18 shows in all. If any of them are as funny as this one was, Sapulpa Community Theatre has many more sell-outs in its future.
Full disclosure: Herald Editor Micah Choquette is president of the theatre’s board of directors.
