A Victorian Style Christmas

Over the next week-and-a-half, Stage Door Theatre Company, Third Avenue Playhouse’s resident professional theater troupe, will present a readers theater evening of poems, holiday stories and a bit of Shakespeare during seven performances of “Yuletide Tales,” which begin Dec. 19.

The evening will offer up an assortment of holiday cheer that harkens back days of old when Christmas carolers, horse drawn carriages and school pageants were a regular part of the season’s offerings.

“Yuletide Tales” will be a break from the past two Christmas traditions of TAP, which involved one-man holiday shows. This year, the hope was to do another one-man show or a non-Christmas play (still touching on the themes of the season), but when casting didn’t work out, co-artistic director James Valcq and Bob Boles turned their thoughts to another idea.

“I said, ‘I want to do something Christmasy. I really think we should,’” Valcq recalls. “And Bob and [education director Ryan Patrick Shaw] said, ‘Well James, why don’t you put something together? So I did.”

Inspired by Victorian traditions of the late 1800s and early 1900s, Valcq began researching the leisure activities of a time without Internet, television and Smartphones.

“I was wondering, ‘What kinds of things did they do for entertainment in that time? What was their Christmas entertainment? There was no Internet or television. At the turn of the century, there were barely movies or radio or phonograph records so people had to make their own entertainment,” Valcq says.

Through his research, Valcq discovered actual programs from the turn of the century that people once performed at Christmas time, including pageants and skits.

“Bits and pieces of things that were in these programs I thought were still pretty compelling – the idea that people would gather in a village hall or a town auditorium and tell stories, read poems, sing songs about Christmas,” Valcq says. “And that’s exactly what we’re going to do.

“Everything that we’re doing in the show would have been familiar 100 years ago,” he adds. “It’s all stuff from that era. Some of it was old even then and some of it was actually kind of new.”

“Yuletide Tales” will include stories by well-known authors Hans Christian Andersen, O. Henry, and L. Frank Baum, as well as a bit of Shakespeare. While some of the presentation will be familiar to the audience, a few surprises are in store.

“We’re going to be doing a parody of The Night Before Christmas, which is from the mid-1800s. I didn’t even know they did that kind of thing back then!” Valcq says. “But some wag wrote a humorous take on that poem shortly after the actual The Night Before Christmas came out and I didn’t even know that existed.”

“Yuletide Tales” will feature the voice talents of Valcq, Robert Boles, Amy Ensign, Michaela Kraft, Ryan Patrick Shaw and Isaiah Spetz. It is appropriate for people of all ages.

With seven performances through Dec. 28, there is no reason to miss what is sure to be festive, old-fashioned Christmas theater – with less emphasis on costumes and trimmings, and more on the stories themselves.

“The emphasis is off of the sets, costumes and lighting and the emphasis goes to the words,” Valcq says. “When you’ve got good, engaging actors delivering the material, it’s just a really unique experience. It engages your imagination in a really wonderful and different way than seeing a play.”

Performances will be held Dec. 19, 22-23, 26-27 at 7:30 pm and Dec. 21 and 28 at 2 pm. Tickets are $15 general admission, $10 students 12-24, and $5 for children 11 and under. For more information visit thirdavenueplayhouse.com.