Bruce Sandford and Carolyn Freeman at rehearsal for A Christmas Carol: A Live Radio Play. (Image From Facebook/MHMTheatre

By Chris Brown

Shows run Dec. 2-10

Experience a Christmas classic in a new way with Medicine Hat Musical Theatre

Nov 29, 2022 | 11:05 AM

MEDICINE HAT, AB – There are countless retellings and reimaginings of A Christmas Carol and odds are you’ve seen at least two of them either on screen or stage.

But you probably haven’t seen it the way Medicine Hat Musical Theatre is presenting it. The group has six performances of A Christmas Carol: A Live Radio Play from Dec. 2-10.

Director Travis Boser says the radio show format asks the audience to use their imagination in ways they normally don’t need to or get the chance to when at the MHMT playhouse.

“We all have our favourite version of this story, and this allows you to experience it in a new way while also keeping true to the one that you know and love,” he says. “This script stays true to the emotion that Dickens wrote into the original story, leaning into humour and more sombre moments that ask us to reflect on how we can make our society a better place each day.”

Boser says A Christmas Carol is one of his favourite Christmas stories and has fond childhood memories of watching the 1951 Alistair Sim film version each year with his family.

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This is the second year the theatre has done a Christmas radio play in December, following It’s a Wonderful Life in 2021. That followed the group’s first radio play, War of the Worlds, a few months earlier. Boser says doing well-known stories is a way to ease into a new form of theatre.

He says audiences responded well to the first two, which were done in response to the existing COVID restrictions. Those now gone, new avenues are opened for the presentation.

“It gives us an opportunity to present the show more correctly as a radio play, with actors swapping microphones and adding in singers,” he says.

Boser says that in the radio era of the 1940s, it was common for studios to have contracted singers that would provide music for their shows. A lot of the big acts of the day, such as the Andrews Sisters, got their start this way and would go back and do shows to help boost their careers and albums, he explains.

“So we added the singers to provide their voices during the commercial jingles in the show, as well as at different points throughout the show,” Boser says. “They add a whole new level to the show with not only their harmonies, but their own antics as well to entertain the audience.”

He says foley artist Carolyn Freeman is also back to keep the audience entertained with her own antics and creative sounds.

On stage providing the voices are Bruce Sandford, Tracey Avery, Darlene Dee, Darren Rathwell and Ryan Haystead. Geoff Coley, Brenda McLaren, Colleen Whidden, and John Whidden round out the cast as the singers.

For more information and to buy tickets, visit mhmtheatre.com.