Category Archives: Interviews

Go over the rainbow with Alliance’s folk art take on “Oz”

When it comes to Americana, even a tornado would have a hard time uncovering a story as ingrained in American pop culture as The Wizard of Oz. Though this tale has been told in multiple ways since the 1900 publication of the L. Frank Baum-penned The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, it’s the 1939 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film starring Judy Garland that has taught most of us that it’s fun to follow the proverbial yellow brick road, but there is ultimately no place like home. Through March 11, the Alliance Theatre will be taking theatergoers over the rainbow in a production that is loyal to the film while also putting its own folk art twist on the tale. From the patchwork pattern that covers the stage floor to the Altoids-tin abdomen of the Tin Woodsman, this version definitely borrows heavily from its surroundings while paying homage to what has become one of Hollywood’s most memorable films. Director Rosemary Newcott (the Alliance’s Sally G. Tomlinson Artistic Director of Theatre for Youth) takes a moment to talk to Wrestling with Pop Culture about the folk art influences of the play and more.

Your interpretation of The Wizard of Oz is very loyal to the 1939 movie, but it also puts a folk art visual spin on things. That actually seems like a natural fit, but why did you choose to incorporate folk art into the production? Were there any challenges in doing that?

I’m married to a folk artist, so it’s all over my house and I look at it all the time. When you’re looking to design a show you’re always looking at what possible ways you can go, especially when you’re taking an iconic movie like that. You can’t put the film on the stage. So between looking at my husband’s art and basically playing off the Tin Man, who is a piece of folk art as he originally existed – and even if you look at Baum’s drawings there’s some kind of folk art sensibility to his original illustrations – that connection was what inspired this show.

He was about Americana and sought to create this American fairy tale when he wrote The Wizard of Oz. One of my earliest memories is seeing that MGM movie with my family. Talk about pop culture, that film’s images and lines and characters are so integrated into who we all are, certainly on a national level but even internationally, that particular movie and story has just been so constant. In the long run, it’s about how a family and how relationships work, where you find your home and what’s important to you. From that perspective, it’s very connected to the way that a folk artist uses the elements around his or her home to create. When we looked at that, which is just taking out of the earth and creating from wherever you live, it seemed to be such a perfect connection to what that story is.

The Wrestling with Pop culture logo by KRK Ryden has a yellow brick road-like path leading into a giant luchador’s mouth. So I definitely understand how much this story is part of pop culture.

I get it! And it’s so funny, I directed a show in La Jolla, California called Frida Libre. It’s supposed to be Frida Kahlo as a young girl and this other character is aspiring to be one of those Mexican wrestlers. So we played around with that imagery a lot. Of course, out there every other child was Mexican so they really loved it.

You mentioned that your husband is a folk artist. What’s his name?

His name is Tom Marquardt, but he’s got an art name which is TMarq.

You mean like a wrestling gimmick?

Yes! It’s his other persona. He used to do a lot of folk art festivals, but he’s not doing so much of that anymore because the market’s so bad. We did get up to Paradise Garden and got to meet Howard Finster. His persona actually greatly inspired Brandon O’Dell’s Wizard. He watched a lot of videos of Finster and rather than going for the guy in the movie, we just went for more of a Finster-looking gentleman, which is where the costume designer went.

There are some obvious differences between the cast of the movie and the cast of your play. Was that done intentionally to stay with the folk art theme or was it just a matter of who had the best audition?

My mind is always somewhat partial to multicultural casting because I feel like probably 80 percent of my school audiences are African American. We all want to see ourselves up there, but because folk art reflects home, I felt like that needed to be there because that diversity is so reflected in our culture. I would have been even more diverse if I could. There are certain conditions of singing, dancing and acting that you need to have in there, too. But I’m grateful for the amount of talent this city is providing, especially with a lot of actors who are also talented musically. The amount of young people who are triple threats is growing, which is outstanding.

The entire cast is very good, but Brad Raymond as the Cowardly Lion stands out quite a bit.

He’s quite wonderful, and he’s not Bert Lahr. When I first got into that audition process, almost everyone was coming in and trying to do Bert Lahr imitations. You can’t do that! So it was great when Brad came in with something that was uniquely his own twist on it, even though it sort of honors Bert Lahr in some respects.

There are certain parts of the movie that you obviously can’t recreate in this setting, such as when the Wicked Witch of the West catches the Scarecrow on fire, or the Witch having an entire army of green guys. But you captured the feel of the movie without having little people in the cast. Did you have the idea to have puppets and other tricks from the beginning?

It was abosolutely part of the plan, but very tricky. I’m grateful to have Reay Kaplan and Patrick McColery, who have both puppeteered extensively. And Michael Haverty, who did this amazing piece based on Alice in Wonderland that was about his mother at 7 Stages last year, helped us with conceptualizing the puppets. We started brainstorming for this a little less than a year ago. We’d just gather at my house, look at folk art and talk about how to invent this in a way that honors the movie and can still represent that populous. Munchkinland was the trickiest one because it’s a whole culture of little people. If I could cast children, I would. But I can’t, so this was the only way to go. The invention happens because of your limitations, so it reminds me of folk art in that we were taking what little we had and creating from it. The resources at the Alliance obviously helped, too. I’m grateful for the artists and they take such pride in it. It really took a while to evolve Toto because he is handled so much in the show, but I love what they came up with.

The show wraps up this weekend. What do you have planned after that?

We’re taking it on tour to LaGrange and that will be fun for the kids and families out there. It’s at a school that can accommodate some of our scenic elements, but we can’t bring all of them. Hopefully it will be something we can pack up and revive. It’s so connected to everybody I hope it’s something we can bring back.

Right now I’m developing a new piece for our Theatre for the Very Young component, which serves 18-month-old to 5-year-old children. It will play in the Black Box Theatre on the third floor of the Alliance. It’s amazing for me because how do you entertain 18-month-old kids? It’s very installation based and very hands on. They wander right into the space and they’re part of the show. I’m partnering with Lauri Stallings from gloATL for The Tranquil Tortoise and the Hoppity Hare. It’s kind of a dance piece created specifically for younger kids.

Right after that I’m off to The Kennedy Center to remount a production called Knuffle Bunny by Mo Willems, which is a piece about a baby and her Knuffle Bunny. Then who knows what’s next? There’s always something cooking up.

For more information, go to www.alliancetheatre.org.

Fantasy and reality are almost indistinguishable in “The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls”

Leave a reply

By Jonathan Williams

Playwright Meg Miroshnik

Once upon a time. It’s the way many fairy tales begin, so it’s only fitting that the Russian equivalent of that phrase is used to begin The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls, the 2012 winner of the Alliance/Kendeda Graduate Playwriting Competition. The world premiere of the play (on the Alliance Theatre‘s Hertz Stage through Feb. 26) draws strong parallels between the events of Russian folk tales and the events of the lives of contemporary Russian girls, to the point that it becomes difficult to distinguish between metaphorical fantasy and literal reality. Even though these stories are uniquely Russian, American audiences are likely to recognize elements from stories such as Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Bears and Hansel and Gretel. But what might be more difficult to grasp is just how similar contemporary Russian life can be to the folk tales embedded into its culture. But, as Nastya (played by Bree Dawn Shannon) reiterates, “This shit happens.” Playwright Meg Miroshnik conceived of The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls after visiting Russia a few years ago. As the play’s first run winds down, she talks to Wrestling with Pop Culture about the show’s fairy tale influences and going to see Empire/Platinum Championship Wrestling with one of the stars of her play while she was in Atlanta.

I’ve seen Diany Rodriguez, who plays Masha, several times at the Academy Theatre. But not in any of the plays there.

PCW! Yeah, she took me along. It was actually one of my favorite things I did while I was in Atlanta.

Oh, so you went with her. How many of those shows did you go to?

I just went one Friday. It was really great.

I got used to seeing her there every Friday night, but I had no idea she was an actress. So when I saw her come out at the beginning of The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls, I realized why I hadn’t seen her at the wrestling shows in a few weeks.

It was really fun to see her at those shows because she’s such a small person, but she’s just so careless with her aggression when she’s taunting the wrestlers. It was kind of great for her character [whose abusive boyfriend becomes a bear], actually, to see her like that. Even knowing how theatrical the event was, at a couple of points I got a little scared for her because she was so aggressive with these big guys.

Your play is obviously a little bit different from wrestling, though it does blur the lines between fantasy and reality in some similar ways. A lot of the fairy tales referenced in your play are familiar to American audiences. Do children in Russia grow up reading pretty much the same stories?

Annie (Sarah Elizabeth Wallis) stands up to her Auntie Yaraslova/Baba Yaga (Judy Leavell)

I think a lot of them are sort of cousins of fairy tales that Americans grew up with. The Russian fairy tales in this show are Masha and the Bear, which is the story Diany tells (of course it’s modified to exist both in a contemporary Moscow and an older Russian folk tale world.); The Wise Little Girl, the riddle story Katya tells, is a fairy tale; Baba Yaga is true to the fairy tale; and the story that Nastya tells of the fearful bride is (aside from the retribution of the ending, which I added) is almost word-for-word the Russian fairy tale.

A lot of them are very familiar to American audiences, but the things I was interested in were sort of different. Baba Yaga was the first character that really inspired me to write the play and I was really interested in the idea of a witch. She feels kind of like Hansel and Gretel‘s in a lot of stories, especially stories where little girls are forced to stay with her. But she’s also a secondary or tertiary character in a lot of other stories that focus on male heroes, where she’s just this background character that is very helpful and grandmotherly. So I was interested in that dichotomy. I felt like it was very different than the fairy tales I had grown up with where the witches were just bad. I thought she was a little more complicated.

There are certain phrases that are repeated, particularly one where older women tell younger women they can smell their bones. Phrases like that sound a little odd to an American audience, but are those common phrases in Russia?

The idea of a girl having the smell of the roots about her actually does come from Russian folk tales. My hopes with reusing some of those phrases was that they then take on very different meanings. Like when Valentina is telling Katya she smells her bones and that disgusting body spray, it kind of exists in both the fairy tale and the real world in that way. Hopefully those phrases become a little more familiar as they’re repeated throughout the play.

Considering that you are weaving fairy tales into reality, how literally is the audience supposed to take some of these stories? Since it’s pointed out a few times that the American protagonist Annie speaks Russian with an accent, is that meant to imply that maybe she is taking metaphorical things literally because she’s not as fluent in the language?

It’s interesting to talk to audience members afterward and see how literally people take it, especially the ending. It’s been pretty split. The balance I’ve always described is it’s 20 percent fairy tale and 80 percent real world in the beginning of the play and that ratio is very quickly inverted so that by the end we’re living in an 80 percent literal fairy tale. I wanted the situations to be able to exist in both contexts, so after they kill Valentina and Baba Yaga you get that line of “two suicides in one night,” drawing a parallel for the audience of what this would be if it were just a metaphor. Of course there are some design elements that point us towards more literal interpretations like, obviously, having a bear on stage tips the balance there. But I wanted both to exist throughout the play.

I also noticed a lot of reference to eyes, such as the evil eye pendant Annie’s mother puts on her coat before sending her to Russia and Baba Yaga’s line about the potatoes having eyes when Annie is trying to run away. It reminded me a little of Edgar Allan Poe, but is that a common theme in Russian folk tales?

Aunti Yaraslova (Judy Leavell) gives Annie (Sarah Elizabeth Wallis) reason to think she's a witch

There’s a sense of superstition that pervades the whole play and the evil eye was an important part of that for me. Since it starts out as a fairy tale does, with the heroine setting out on a journey and receiving a warning, I thought that was an important way to do that. And that type of superstition in the culture is definitely real. There are very specific things you don’t do because of bad luck. The way Olga buys into the literal existence of the fairy tale world is a question we want to be asking from the beginning. But I had actually connected the evil eye to the potato eyes before. Although there’s a similar expression to potatoes having eyes in Russian, it’s not exactly the same.

Now that this play is coming to a close, what is your next project?

The next thing I’m working on is in Chicago next month for an adaptation of a Shostakovich libretto that I did for the Chicago Opera Theater called Moscow, Cheryomushki. It’s a musical comedy and I loosely adapted it from the Russian original. It’s funny that these two Russian-themed pieces are happening so close together.

I lived there for a couple of years, which is wear the idea for the play came from. And that’s how I’ve sort of fallen into a couple of projects that were Russian related. I actually got to go back in December because the play was workshopped and will be produced by a theater in Moscow, although it’s a radically different production. The Alliance production is really showing the play at its best, so I hope someone else will pick it up. It’s a crazy ride, but on paper I think it may look like an impossible ride. Although it’s crazy and unexpected at times, I think this production really shows that it can work.

For more information, go to www.alliancetheatre.org.

Mike Alessi looks to leap up the standings at this weekend’s Supercross event

Leave a reply

By Jonathan Williams

When it comes to racing dirt bikes, Mike Alessi has one key strategy: get ahead early in the race. And he’s become so good at being the first rider through the first turn that he has become affectionately known as the Holeshot Kid. After some setbacks last year, Alessi has been racing pretty strong in 2012, currently in eight place in the Supercross points standings. Having come off his strongest finish of the year (he finished fourth in last weekend’s race in Dallas), Alessi looks to move up a little more when he competes at this weekend’s Atlanta Monster Energy Supercross race at the Georgia Dome. As he prepares for Saturday’s race, he takes a moment to talk to Wrestling with Pop Culture about how he plans on making 2012 one of his best years yet.

Your nickname is the Holeshot Kid. When did people start calling you that?

I got the Holeshot Kid because I was always getting the holeshot. I don’t know where it started, but someone was just looking for a nickname for me I guess.

You’ve had a few setbacks recently that have taken you out of racing a little bit. But you’ve bounced back and have done pretty well so far in 2012. How do you feel about how things have been going since you’ve come back?

I think the season has been going pretty good so far. I’ve pretty much been finishing second or third in the heat races, which means I get to start with the front guys. I’ve had some good races. The main events have been kind of up and down, but I’ve put together a pretty good start. If I can pull out front I really think I can do good.

You also recently started riding a new bike. How has that affected your riding?

Yep. I’m riding for the MotoConcepts racing team for 2012. It’s been great. They’ve been working hard, giving 110 percent and I just want to give them back what they’re putting in and get some good results. We’ve all been working hard.

Your brother Jeff is also on your team. What is it like racing with your brother while also trying to outdo him?

Yep. My brother and I are on the same team riding for the MotoConcepts team. He’s been doing pretty good. [Two weeks ago] he made the main event and we’re looking for good things to come from him.

I always want to beat my brother because I don’t want him being able to say, “Oh, I beat my big brother.” I’ve got to always beat him.

You’ve been riding since you were very young and you made your professional debut at a very young age. So you’ve both been doing this your entire lives. What was it like coming into the sport with your brother?

I started riding when I was three years old and started racing when I was four. It’s just all I’ve ever done and all I know. My brother’s always been racing, too. He started a year after me.

Since this is all you’ve ever done, it’s probably hard to imagine doing anything else. But if you weren’t riding motorcycles professionally what else do you think you might be doing?

I don’t know. Honestly this is all I know. This is what I’ve been doing my whole life, so it’s hard to say.

This weekend’s race is almost the halfway mark of the season. Where do you hope to be by then and how do you plan on moving up as the season progresses?

I’m in the top ten and I’m striving to get better with every race and get better results. Like I said before, it’s all about getting a good start and racing up front and putting yourself in a good position to have a good race. I think that’s where it all starts.

You mentioned your friendly rivalry with your brother. Are there any other riders you specifically want to outdo or are you just looking to outdo everyone?

Everybody’s fast right now. It’s so competitive. The speed everybody’s riding at is fast and you’ve just got to put yourself in a good position and get a good start because 90 percent of the racing right now is all in the start.

A lot of guys these days go from racing to freestyle riding. With things like Nuclear Cowboyz gaining popularity, do you think you’ll ever cross over into the more performance-based riding found there?

I don’t do any freestyle. I just focus on training and riding and trying to do my best to be competitive and try to win the races. I just give the best I can give and that’s all I do.

For more information, go to www.alessiracing.com or www.supercrossonline.com.

Madusa is a female champion in a man’s world – again

Leave a reply

During her professional wrestling career, the woman best known as Madusa helped legitimize women’s wrestling in the American Wrestling Association, World Wrestling Federation (now WWE), All Japan Women’s Pro Wrestling and World Championship Wrestling. She held the Women’s Championship in pretty much every organization she worked for and was the first and only woman to ever hold the WCW Cruiserweight Championship (just one of many firsts for the woman also known as Alundra Blayze). Having put her wrestling career behind her, Madusa is now a successful Monster Jam truck driver (driving the Madusa truck, of course), having won the World Finals Championship in both freestyle and racing. As she readies for this Saturday’s Monster Jam event at the Georgia Dome, Madusa spoke with Georgia Wrestling History‘s Georgia Wrestling Now on Jan. 9. Here are the highlights from the interview, conducted by Wrestling with Pop Culture, Nemesis, Matt Hankins and Harold Jay Taylor.

You’ve been driving monster trucks for several years now. Did you go directly from wrestling to monster trucks?

I had my first show [of the year] last weekend in Tulsa, Oklahoma and just slapped the snot out of the boys. I love it. Altogether I’ve been driving about 10-12 years. But we only drive three months a year, so actually only maybe two-and-a-half, three years. I’ve won two championships and it has not come easy, I’ll tell you that.

I was still wrestling when I went into monster trucks. Monster Jam approached me because they wanted a cross promotion and wanted a name to get more little girls in seats and that’s exactly what they’ve accomplished.

Do you make more money driving trucks than you did in wrestling?

Oh, hell no. I made more money in wrestling. However, I’ve been frugal and smart and have other businesses and things going on. So I can enjoy what I do and I’ve been blessed. Monster trucks are sort of how wrestling was 20 years ago, so I think it’s going to take another ten years or so before the pay is the same. I remember the days when I had to drive 300 miles and I made five bucks. But you’ve got to love what you do. If you don’t love what you do it will show. Little boys have dreams of being in the spot I’m in and I just fell into it. I had never been to a monster truck show, never really seen one and never could really give a hoot, so I’m lucky.

When you first started driving a monster truck there were several other wrestling-themed trucks. None of those are around these days, but you’re still here. Why do you think you’ve outlasted the other wrestling trucks? Are you just that damn good?

Yes, I am that damn good. However, they had a contract with WCW for some of the names in WCW. I was the only talent that actually drove their own truck. Goldberg, NWO and all of them, they licensed their names over to Monster Jam. None of them drove their trucks. Goldberg’s quote was, “There’s no way in hell I’m getting in that truck. You are crazy, girl.” I’m an adrenaline junkie. I love it and it was a great marriage. It was perfect. And for 10, 12 years I’ve just been jamming it, kicking it to the top, winning two championships.

It has not been easy being a woman in a man’s world – not just once, but twice – and have to prove yourself from the bottom up all over again. When I finally did win a championship, that’s when I earned the guys’ respect.

How many female monster truck drivers are there?

There’s not enough. I think there are about five of us now. Being the First Lady of Monster Jam and opening the doors for others, it’s a great feeling to see the change and possibilities. We have some great female drivers, so it just feels so good to see them rising through the ranks. I hope one of them gets a championship here soon because it would be good to have another woman on board to feel this great feeling. When I won the championship, I won it in racing. It was against Dennis Anderson [and] Grave Digger, so when you have man against woman, student against teacher, Ford against Chevy and icon against icon, I almost couldn’t breathe! When I’m sitting at that starting line and that light is red, waiting to turn green to go, I was as calm as could be right then and there. The only thing I could think of is, “Oh my gosh! This is like ‘Big Daddy’ Don Garlits and Shirley Muldowney, and I’m gonna kick his ass.” And I did. It was awesome and it was the best feeling ever.

Have you ever thought of branching out into other types of racing?

Honey, if I was 20 years younger I probably would. I’ve always been a motorhead. I’ve been riding Harleys for over 20 years and dirt bikes and four wheelers and I love to hunt. I’m a girlie girl inside at times and I love to put on makeup and jump in the high heels. In my earlier years I was always ahead of my time. From wrestling to boxing to going to Japan to whatever, it just feels so good to have been able to pave a lot of avenues for what it is today. I really wish I would have thought of NASCAR 20 years ago or so. I would’ve been good.

You’re good, but you’re also a character that people want to go see. It seems like drag racing and other sports could use someone like that.

Madusa isn’t just a name or a character any more; it’s a brand. It has taken many years to do that, but it’s a brand. But talking about top people? Oh, honey. You look at them Force girls. I wish I could be one of them. One of the Force girls said, “I dig that Madusa chick in her monster truck.” Well, little does she know I dig her and her racing. She’s got a great push, a great name and some great talent, so she’ll be able to go a long way in her sport and carry it along for other women.

Which do you think is more physically dangerous, wrestling or driving a monster truck?

I get hurt more in this truck than I did in wrestling. After 18 years of pro wrestling, broken bones, blown knees and whatnot, you can imagine what 10,000 pounds of g-force in mid air will do to your body. You’ve got to take precautions either way. But anything is dangerous. Walking out of the house is dangerous. You’ve just got to think smart and be smart. They take 100% safety precautions in any arena they’re at, so it is what it is.

You’ll always be remembered in wrestling for taking the WWF Women’s Championship to WCW and throwing it in a garbage can on Monday Nitro. You obviously accomplished a lot in wrestling aside from that, but if there’s anything you’d like to be remembered for in wrestling what would it be?

I was under contract and I was told to do that by Eric Bischoff or “there’s the door.” But there’s a lot of things to be memorable for. Opening the doors for the new Divas division, opening the doors for women to be who they are today, changing up women’s wrestling, making it legit wrestling, bringing Japanese wrestling into women’s wrestling. Do we actually throw in winning championships? I don’t know. You tell me.

Do you keep up with what’s currently going on in wrestling?

I don’t make a point to watch it. If it’s on TV and I’m surfing and see it, I will [watch it]. Lately I’ve been catching Beth Phoenix on there and I thought, “Dang. It’s about time we got some girls on there that can kinda wrestle, look good, have some knowledge. Every time she wrestles someone, she’s the one that’s carrying the opponent. And she has to always set herself back to make the other person look good. You know what that reminds me of? It reminds me of when I was there and it pisses me off. I feel like they’re stiffling her a little bit because [they] don’t have somebody of her caliber. So what do you do? There’s other girls coming up the ranks that are starting to be as good as her, but she’s untouchable right now in WWE.

You still have the title belt you took to Monday Nitro and you recently issued an opportunity to Beth Phoenix to challenge you for it. Do you think you have a chance of that happening?

Well, let’s get something straight. If you’re referring to the YouTube video I posted a few days ago, I was merely talking about my merchandise and the questions I’m being asked. So I was just answering a question. That is not throwing it out there and saying, “I want to come back.” What happened is that video went viral, so I was like, “Why is my merchandise so crazy? Wow, great. More T-shirts sold. That’s awesome.”

To hear the full interview, go to www.blogtalkradio.com/psp. For more information, go to www.madusa.com or www.monsterjam.com.

Chris Kayser reprises his role as Scrooge in Alliance Theatre’s “A Christmas Carol”

Leave a reply

Christmas is this weekend, which means many people are scrambling to see as many more light displays, Christmas concerts and other festivities as they can before Christmas morning is here. And though reading or viewing Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is a tradition for many, the Alliance Theatre‘s annual production has become a tradition for many Atlantans. For veteran stage actor Chris Kayser, who has been involved in the show for 19 years and is reprising his role as Scrooge once again this year, A Christmas Carol has become a part of his holiday tradition on an even deeper level. As the show comes to a close on Christmas Eve, Kayser takes a moment to talk to Wrestling with Pop Culture about what being part of this holiday tradition means to him.

Chris Kayser as Ebenezer Scrooge. Photo by Greg Mooney

I’ve seen you in various plays over the past decade or so, including A Christmas Carol a few times. As one of Atlanta’s most accomplished stage actors, how do you decide which roles you will take and what has kept you playing Scrooge for so many years?

Being in A Christmas Carol is not like being in a Broadway hit, where the run stretches into months, years. It’s just one of six, seven, eight shows I do every year. It’s an all-star Atlanta cast. I get to work with fabulous singers that I don’t normally work with (I’m such a drama guy). I get to work amid the trappings and resources of the Alliance Theatre. I love being a part of a holiday tradition in my hometown. Dickens is one of the giants of literature and this story is worth telling and re-telling. All actors want to play parts that have an arc, a character that is affected and changed by the events of the play. And this is one of the greatest examples of arc. I hope I’m a better actor each year when I tackle this role, so I try to bring to it the full weight of my age and experience. And, oh yes, both my children were born on the 23^rd of December, two years apart, so I need this doggone job. The play, the job, the role have had a very real impact on my life so I make sure I respect it, take it seriously and try to give my very best each and every time out.

Many things about the Alliance’s production of A Christmas Carol (including you playing Scrooge) have stayed the same for many years. Why have you reprised the role of Scrooge so many times? How would you say your portrayal of the character has evolved over the years?

I don’t set out to do something different every year – particularly if it’s just to entertain myself – while still being open to the possibilities. I just try to tell that story to the best of my ability. What has certainly changed is my perspective. And that has to do with age (I’m 62) – looking back, dealing with regrets, looking ahead to the time I have left, how to use that time.

When the time comes to pass the Scrooge torch, are there any actors you’d like to see play the role in your absence?

The role is a little Lear-like in the sense that when you’re old enough to play Lear, you’re too old to carry Cordelia. The run is a very tough, grueling physical challenge. (nine shows a week, 10:30 a.m. matinees). Tim McDonough, Eddie Lee, David de Vries?

Scrooge finds his redemption. Photo by Greg Mooney

Whether it be the Grim Reaper-like Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come or Tiny Tim, redemption is a dominant theme of this timeless tale. What would you say is the most important thing for audiences to take away from this production of A Christmas Carol?

Redemption, no doubt. If you’re still breathing, there’s time to mend your ways. [There are] so many stories in the Bible about how God loves the people who wake up at the last minute.

What other shows do you have planned following A Christmas Carol?

Next up for me is The Ladies Man at Theatre in the Square. A flat-out door-slamming French farce with a great cast. We close A Christmas Carol on the 24^th and we start rehearsals for The Ladies Man on the 26^th. Hey diddly dee, an actor’s life for me.

For more information, go to www.alliancetheatre.org.