Christmas poem, television show inspire Waco stage productions

Playwright Ken Ludwig used Clement Clarke Moore’s well-known 1837 poem “A Visit From St. Nicholas” as the starting point for his comic “’Twas The Night Before Christmas,” presented this weekend by the Wild Imaginings theater company.

And the 1965 animated television special “A Charlie Brown Christmas” served as the source for the theatrical adaptation by the Waco Civic Theatre’s children’s program that opens Thursday.

While the Wild Imaginings production features adult actors and the WCT one has kids — four separate casts’ worth, in fact — both target family audiences with something cheery and light for holiday consumption.

Melissa Lohr, WCT’s youth theater coordinator, and her husband Riley are directing “Charlie Brown” and said the spirit of the season took over when more than 90 kids showed up for auditions. Rather than cast a single production with only a handful of characters, the two opted to create four casts grouped roughly by age: a Pinenuts cast of 4- to 8-year-olds, Chestnuts of 9- and 10-year-olds, Walnuts of 11- and 12-year-olds and Hazelnuts of 13 years and older.

“We wanted to show the Christmas spirit as much as possible,” she said. The four casts enable 20 performances of the play, each roughly a half hour long, four of which are for local schools with the rest open to the public.

In “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” the child characters of Charles Schulz’s popular “Peanuts” cartoon strip deal with various aspects of the approaching holiday. The perpetually beset Charlie Brown tries to direct his friends and classmates in a Christmas story play while bothered by the holiday’s commercialization; bossy Lucy sees herself at the center of everything; Charlie’s dog Snoopy goes all in on Christmas decorations; and soft-spoken Linus saves the day with his retelling of the Christmas story from the Gospel of Luke.

Even though her young casts grew up long after Schulz stopped writing “Peanuts” in 2000, they bring their own appreciation and spin to the play, Lohr said.

The four casts and a constrained rehearsal schedule led to early rehearsals featuring only the Charlie Browns and Snoopys or the Lucys and piano-playing Schroeders, with the full casts assembled in later rehearsals.

Keeping track of casts, characters and performances required “a huge spreadsheet,” Lohr said with a laugh. Those wanting to attend a particular age-group performance can find a breakdown of the performances and casts on the Waco Civic Theatre website.

Between the Saturday afternoon performances will be a Nibbles at the North Pole event for patrons, with Santa cookies, photos with Santa and hot chocolate. While each cast adds a particular flavor to their performance, all share a common tone, the director said. “Expect a ton of Christmas cheer and a cuteness overload,” she said.

Wild Imaginings’ “’Twas The Night Before Christmas,” staged at University Baptist Church, serves as a family-friendly change of pace for the theater company, with drama, new work and Shakespeare more of its usual offerings. “I think we tend to do things on the edgier side,” said director Trent Sutton Clifford. “This is just a nice break.”

Ludwig’s adaptation starts with the poem’s beginning, which is interrupted by a mouse who begs to differ about its version of Santa’s visit — he never showed up, the mouse claims — and goes from there into a comic adventure with the mouse, an elf and a stubborn little girl. “It’s good Christmas fun for the family,” he said.

Complementing the five-actor production is a “Seussified Christmas Carol” staged by eight students from the Wild Imaginings after-school program. “Seussified,” presented at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday at University Baptist, takes the Dickens story and reworks it in verse recalling a Dr. Seuss book, Clifford said.