Performances:
7:00pm, December 3 and 10, 2007 at Rhino's Youth Center & All-Ages Music Club
Noon, December 5, 2007 at the Monroe County Courthouse (Abridged Version)
7:00pm, December 7, and 8 2007 at The Cinemat
3:00pm, December 9, 2007 at The Cinemat
Noon, December 12, 2007 in the Atrium at Bloomington City Hall (Abridged Version)
7:00pm, December 14 and 15, 2007 at the Bloomington Playwrights Project
3:00pm, December 16, 2007 at the Monroe County Public Library Auditorium
7:00pm, December 17, 2007 at the Hilltop Restaurant in Spencer
(Hilltop seating is limited; call 812-829-3891 for reservations.)
Admission Free, Donations Accepted

Ladies and gentlemen of the audience,

Please excuse this show as a sorry excuse for a traditional Charles Dickens' tale, and please beware that the following Third Annual Dinner Theater production of A Christmas Carol is intended to humor and not disgust.

LAUGHING IS ENCOURAGED. Be prepared for an enlightened tour through brief snippets of human trial and error by which an everyman Scrooge becomes a no man of value Scrooge, if we will, before transforming back again. That story is 167 years old.

HO-HO-HO. This play will still show how and why Scrooge became himself, the difficult choices he and others endured because of his preferred path, and the ultimate joy of Scrooge's yet-to-experience circumstances. But this show is surreal in presentation, and dare we say Dickens himself would gaze upon our ever-shining holiday spectacle with skeptical eyes.

BAH-HUMBUG. This free show is not an effort to dispel the traditional Scrooge mythology; instead, the Scrooge myth is explored here through the mind of Scrooge himself. Certain ideas - like the staging in Room 205 of an insane asylum or that the Cratchit's are two of Scooge's roommates or that the Nephew and Fezziwig are Belle are nurses - might seem absurd. They are.

DASHING & DARING. A Christmas Carol this holiday season will include a madman gone wild, a chorus of dancing reindeer elves, a raucous nursing staff with questionable techniques, sock puppetry, and an angel posing as a lamp shade. Parental guidance is suggested for audience members 12 and under.

FEEL FREE TO CRY. Next year some other cast and crew of community volunteers will tackle this very same project in a very different and more traditional way: Christmas caroling, a tearfully gimpy Tiny Tim, a middle-aged or older male Scrooge, and the like. Toward nevermore will succumb our candy-cane rope dresses, a turkey as big as a mouse, and Scrooge's bling-bling among the rest. Might you continue MCCT's holiday tradition in 2008?

CHECK US OUT. Monroe County Civic Theater is a not-for-profit community theater with no permanent space, petite but ample budgets, and plentiful of volunteer opportunities. As such, we ask for any donation your pleasure sensors forsake during this performance. Free community theater is free community theater after all. No experience is ever necessary.

WHY ARE WE HERE? For now, dear ladies and gentlemen of the audience, might we all sit back, try to relax, and enjoy the show?

The Monroe County Civic Theater Dinner Theatre Series is provided with support from the Bloomington Area Arts Council; the Indiana Arts Commission, a state agency; and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.