Christmas Show 2010

This year, at Merryhill, the Christmas Show was a bit different than it used to be. Originally, it was all the grades singing this song. This year, however, we performed a play version of A Christmas Carol.

In A Christmas Carol, a cheap and cruel old man named Ebenezer Scrooge is taken to the past, present, and future by ghosts who try to teach him the error in his ways. He learns to be generous and kind, etc. etc. I’m sure you all know this already.
In the show, I was Ebenezer Scrooge. I had many, many lines to learn in about two and a half months. I had to practice the actual speaking, as well, i.e. the projecting, volume, etc.

We had many months of practice, but we were still having trouble until the last week of the play. Over 20 hours of regular school was lost for in rehearsals during the school day, as well as many after-school sessions. We also only had one day to get all the costumes in order. Some people still made errors in their lines that made strange holes in the dialog, and I had a lot of trouble remembering my lines, my cues, and what my movements were supposed to be. This was probably the biggest problem, and it was very difficult because it was changed almost every day. Once I had gotten it down, I learned that we would have no headset microphones on the day before the play, drastically limiting my movement. On the day before the performance, Monday, December 6, 2010, we went to the place where we would do the play to practice it. This was our last rehearsal, but we still had a few problems. A few characters had not been cast and were not cast. The movements were still being learned, as well as the transitions between scenes. The previously mentioned messed up dialog still existed. However, we did mostly well.

On December 7, 2010, we had the performance. There was no emergency rehearsal, which surprised some teachers, considering how there normally is one. We still had no hunger and ignorance, and we were all tense because of the possibility that the play would get messed up. There were still the problems, but they went unnoticed, and the play was a huge success. Many people, even strangers, told me I was a great actor. This went on for the next few days. I actually had to do one extra bow after my two bows because of the length of the clapping for me during the bows.

All in all, it was great experience, and I hope we’ll do a play next year, too.