By VERNON ROBISON
Moapa Valley Progress
What does the Moapa Valley High School Theatre class do when the Royal Shakespeare Company doesn’t show up to perform its stirring holiday classic, A Christmas Carol? Well, they don costumes of their own and try to put on the show themselves with less than seven hours of prep.
What results is A Christmas Chaos, a play by Michael Wehrli. The MVHS Theatre program will present this hilariously off-kilter version of the holiday favorite next week in the Ron Dalley Theater on Dec. 10-12 starting at 6:00 pm each night.
The fact is, the MVHS Drama group has experienced a little chaos of its own over the past semester. The class got a very late start on this production because of construction that was going on at the high school during the early part of the school year.
“Because of various setbacks caused by the construction project, we couldn’t get into the theatre to start on sets until early October, so the time was tight,” said MVHS theatre teacher Anjie Lee. “I told the students they’d need to pick a play that didn’t have a lot of set requirements just because of the short timeframe. A wild, last minute production of A Christmas Carol seemed oddly appropriate to them under the circumstances.”
The main parts in the production are being played by a quartet of seniors. Scrooge will be played by Payne Morrow, The Director is played by Logan Gollahon, The Stage Director is played by Alyssa Leavitt and the goofy Stage Hand part is played by Brylee Watkins.
In addition, the part of the Writer/Narrator will be played by sophomore Lauranna Bush.
Other cast members play multiple parts in the play which fill out most of the traditional story’s characters.
“It has been fun to put together,” Lee said. “You’d be surprised that a lot of the kids didn’t even know the original Dickens story. So they had to at least get familiar with that before they could get all of the jokes.”
Tickets can be purchased each night at the door. Admission is $5 for students and seniors, $7 for adults and $25 for families.
