Production archive
Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge (2006 revival)
2006 season · Production archive
Christopher Durang’s Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge, a farcical send-up of the perennial Dickens Christmas classic. It’s just like the original, except that the Three Ghosts’ magic is off, Scrooge keeps showing up at Bob Cratchit’s house far too early, and Mrs. Cratchit hates her life and is planning on getting drunk and jumping off London Bridge. If you’re looking for Scrooge’s redemption, look elsewhere. If you just want a good laugh, join us.
- Written by
- Christopher Durang
- Directed by
- Wade P. Wood
- Ran
- November 17 – December 23, 2006
About the production
The show came back for a second December, extended from the previous year’s three-and-a-half weeks to a five-week run. Holiday programming is how most small American theatres survive the winter, and a house that seats seventy-five needs a title that can fill Friday and Saturday nights for a month without a marketing budget. A parody of the most familiar Christmas story in English does that as reliably as the story itself.
Durang’s target is not Dickens so much as the annual industrial reproduction of Dickens; the Charles Dickens Museum counts adaptations of A Christmas Carol in the hundreds. The Vic ran the parody for two years and then, in 2007, switched to Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol, which takes the same novella entirely seriously from the other end.
Where it sat in the season
It was production 8 of 8 in the Vic’s 2006 season. It followed The Weir (Oct 6 – Nov 4, 2006). The full year is set out on the season calendars page, and every production the theatre staged between 2005 and 2011 is indexed in the production archive.
The house’s standard pattern was Friday and Saturday evenings at 7.30 with a Sunday matinee, over a run of six to eight weeks. With seventy-five seats, a full eight-week run put roughly 1,800 people through the room — which a 500-seat theatre does in four nights, and which is the single fact that explains most of what the Vic chose to programme.
This page is part of the production archive of the Denver Victorian Playhouse, a seventy-five-seat theatre in the basement of a northwest Denver house that staged its last performance in 2011. Details here are restored from the theatre’s own records as they were published at the time; press quotations are reproduced with their original attributions and nothing has been added to them.