Production archive
Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge
2005 season · Production archive
The regional premiere of 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 25 – December 18, 2005
About the production
Durang’s play works by treating A Christmas Carol as a machine that has broken down mid-performance, and it needs a company willing to play the wreckage absolutely straight. It became the Vic’s first Christmas show and returned the following year by demand, which made it the closest thing the house had to a holiday tradition of its own before Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol took the slot in 2007.
The joke depends on the audience knowing the original very well indeed — the Dickens novella has been continuously in print and continuously adapted since 1843, a history the Charles Dickens Museum in London traces in the house where much of his early work was written. In a seventy-five-seat basement in December, with the radiators going and the audience in coats, the parody had an advantage no large house could buy.
Where it sat in the season
It was production 3 of 3 in the Vic’s 2005 season. It followed Appliance (Oct 20 – Nov 19, 2005). 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.