Welcome the ghosts of Christmas laughs

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This article was published 16/12/2023 (973 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Though this review is based only on a single instalment of Bigger Dickens Energy, Outside Joke’s improvised musical reimagination of A Christmas Carol, take it as a wholehearted endorsement of the company’s entire two-week stand at Prairie Theatre Exchange.

Each evening, the talented troupe — Andrea del Campo, Chadd Henderson, Toby Hughes, RobYn Slade, Jane Testar and Paul De Gurse — manage to take the essential contours of the 180-year-old tale of the covetous old sinner Ebenezer Scrooge and create something wholly original and entirely delightful.

Though the performers make it look so, there is nothing simple about their collective achievement. Performing together for over 20 years as an improv troupe, Outside Joke is multilingual, with fluent comprehension of one another’s movements and intricacies, and a functional, oftentimes hilarious understanding of Charles Dickens’ melodic, dramatic prose.

And though one might be tempted to dismiss the performance’s five-stave framework as restrictive to the group’s creativity, they manage to find freedom in narrative constraint, refinement in simplicity and virtue in possibility. To watch Outside Joke is to witness six sculptors kneading the same lump of clay, and the resultant, perfectly misshapen statue is one only they could have rendered.

Once the audience takes its seats, the troupe of performers, ballasted by the sturdy piano stylings of De Gurse, enters the Cherry Karpyshin Mainstage, overflowing with pep and pop. None of the actors know which role they’ll take on until they tear open an envelope, stuffed in a personalized stocking and wheeled out on a shopping cart.

After they unseal their fates, they ask the audience for a non-geographical location and add into the mix a randomized suggestion from their show sponsor, Red River Co-Op: on Thursday night, that suggestion was cat litter, which for Outside Joke might as well have been catnip.

They open the show with their own new carol, Litter on the Tree, inspiring an impromptu, theatre-wide singalong, bolstered by a long-haired basso sitting in the front row.

The role of Scrooge went to Henderson and instead of the original setting, the story was transplanted to the audience’s recommended locale of a library. But this being Outside Joke’s library, not the Millennium or the Cornish, this literary repository is surrounded by wrought-iron gates, with feline gargoyles prowling on the rooftop. It’s a draconian, for-profit endeavour that charges readers $1 per page enjoyed and has a return slot thinner than Scrooge’s patience.

Henderson, who often excels in supporting roles, is a worthy and even touching Scrooge, leveraging his towering frame to massive comedic effect. When two workers from a regular, non-profit library ask him to donate some books he has in multiple so the children can read, Henderson literally looks down his nose at them before sending them flying down a trapdoor into the basement, where Scrooge sleeps on a bed of kitty litter with his own furry friend, Archimedes.

Hughes plays Archimedes so well — hacking up air and gagging on nothing — that one can assume it’s not his first time portraying a cat. Meanwhile, del Campo and Testar mew in frantic harmony while the ghost of Jacob Marley, also Hughes, visits Scrooge with a late-night serenade of mournful warning.

Henderson’s Scrooge fits the Dickensian prototype, berating his nephew Fred (Slade) and refusing to participate in his annual Christmas reading with his fiancée. He’s just as rude to Mr. Cratchit (Testar), telling his long-suffering librarian’s assistant that Christmas Eve will be his last day off for 10 years.

“That puts a lot of pressure on me to have a good Christmas,” deadpans Testar, who later on contributes the night’s most remarkably offbeat and memorable joke.

Soon, Scrooge is visited by spirits. The first is a snivelly bookworm, played by Slade, who inches along as she reminds the miser of the days of yore, when he was a four-year-old boy with his nose buried in atlases and out-of-date Lonely Planet travel guides. The next is Dickens himself, reimagined by del Campo as a Cockney chimney sweep with a singsong delivery, Dickens à la Dick Van Dyke.

When Scrooge visits the Cratchit home, Testar sends the performance into another stratus, making an inspired choice that reeks of comic genius. Helping her feeble son (Hughes) put the star atop the Christmas tree, Testar’s Bob Cratchit realizes that she will have to give her child a new moniker to advance the story further: Tuna Can Tim is born.

Hughes, who has recently played Mr. Green in the RMTC production of Clue, gives a tour-de-force performance as the fish-boy, who, without adequate refrigeration, will expire by the new year. Slade, as Tim’s entirely human older sister, seals him up in a plastic bag with a chip-clip. If he isn’t preserved properly, the family will have no choice but to feed his corpse to their own cat.

Charles Dickens could never.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com