Thanks To Town Players Of Newtown

By Julie Stern

Director Mary Poile and Musical Director Amanda B. Goodman have put together a gentle, charming, totally enjoyable production of Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales. Running just under an hour, with no intermission, it is performed by The Town Players of Newtown as a BBC radio show, lovingly narrated by Christopher Bird. A company of nine perform the roles of 16 characters, as well as make up a chorus singing Christmas carols.

The combination of Thomas’s poetic language and the universal romance of memory serve to evoke a wondrous happy time “before the motor car” when snows were deeper and family gatherings were jollier and everyone was innocent and hopeful and filled with anticipation.

The play strings together a series of vignettes, beginning with the postman on his rounds, school boys throwing snowballs, firemen dousing a small conflagration, a caroling visit to a “haunted house” and a collection of aunts and uncles providing homemade entertainment, spiked by Christmas rum.

Newtown  Middle school student Will Sandercox plays the narrator as a young boy, acting out his memories, accompanied by Gabriel Gordon as “Jim” and Reed School fifth grade student Jordan Williams doing as masterful job as  all the other village kids, tossing snowballs, daring to approach the haunted house (singing faster and faster in order to get it over with) and listening happily to the performances of the aunts and uncles delivering their parlor solos — especially Auntie Hannah, who’s been dipping into the rum.

Pam Meister, Deirdre Seeley, Nina Wilson, Linda Panovich-Sachs, Pat Fink and Nancy Gordon round out the cast.

It’s a wonderful holiday show, and my only complaint is that it is only on for another week.

(Remaining performances are Friday and Saturday, December 3-4, at 8 pm, and Sunday, December 5, at 2; tickets are $10, $5 for ages 10 and under.

Town Players of Newtown perform at The Little Theatre, 18 Orchard Hill Road in Newtown. Call 203-270-9144 or visit www.NewtownPlayers.org for reservations and additional information.)