On Stage: Christmas through the eyes of a child

Those who are blind to the enticements of the holiday season might consider engaging the services of what one might think of as "seeing-eye children." Youngsters perceive delights that have become invisible to jaded adults.

Both Stone Soup Theatre and Seattle Public Theater are staging productions that see Christmas from children's points of view. They are about children. And they feature performances by children.

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

"Sentimental" is bad. Sentimental wishful thinking can get you into troubles ranging from a bad marriage to a horrendous war.

And yet, though it is richly sentimental, "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever" is not bad. It is sentimental in a good way. Barbara Robinson's 1972 story is about things going wrong but ending up right. It poses a serious threat to even the most determined grumpiness.

Sitting in an audience surrounded by darling children, watching a cast that includes a dozen darling children, strains even the flintiest heart. On top of that, there's Robinson's theme. A church Sunday school nativity pageant is transformed from a boring exercise in smug respectability into a startling spectacle of transformation. The poetry of St. Luke and the magic of theater share the credit.

The Herdman kids live on welfare. They are angry. They are bullies. They are loud. They wear a lot of steel-studded black leather. Their home is visited regularly by Child Protective Services workers. Lured by tales of free refreshments, they swarm into a church just as the annual Christmas pageant is getting organized. Who should be cast as the Virgin Mary but the much-pierced Imogene Herdman. She easily intimidates the goody-goody girl who, up till then, had "always played Mary."

Granted, it is hard to make convincing delinquents out of the earnest, hard-working sorts of kids who go in for after-school theater. But Public Theater director Shana Bestock gets sufficient rowdiness out of the youngsters who play the Herdmans to heat up dramatic conflict.

Offering some subtlety, Kaya Wynn portrays Imogene as a tough punk who betrays longings for tenderness and acceptance when she thinks no one is looking. And Peter Durning, who plays one of the respectable, middle-class Sunday school kids, reveals the occasional glimpse of savvy cynicism.

Therese Diekhans as the aptly named Grace, the volunteer pageant producer, and Brad Harrington, as Grace's husband and sanity coach, are both droll.

I've seen "The Best Christmas Pageant," produced by one company or another, at least five times over the past 25 years. I always laugh when Harrington's character says that the caroling preschoolers sound like "a closet full of mice." At the end of the show, goodness prevails over meanness. It is then that the steadily gathering forces of sentiment mercilessly attack grumpiness. Helpless, I always surrender.

The Public Theater is at 7312 W. Green Lake Drive N. "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever" runs there through Dec. 24. Tickets are $14-$27; 206-524-1300 or seattlepublictheater.org.

A Child's Christmas in Wales Dylan Thomas' play is a verbal picture book originally performed, in 1955, as a British Broadcasting Corp. radio feature.

With words, Thomas creates sound effects ("the gong was bombilating"), scenery ("the harp-shaped hills"), props ("a celluloid duck that made, when you pressed it, a most unducklike sound, a mewing moo that an ambitious cat might make who wished to be a cow") and characters ("two hale young men, with big pipes blazing, no overcoats and windblown scarfs, would trudge, unspeaking, down to the forlorn sea, to work up an appetite, to blow away fumes, who knows, to walk into the waves until nothing of them was left but the two curling smoke clouds of their briars.")

Thomas' ornate poetry is not ideally suited to be enunciated by the elementary and middle school kids who constitute most of the Stone Soup cast. There's a certain amount of stumbling, fumbling and mumbling. But most of the "Child's Christmas" incidents are perceived by or experienced by children. So in that sense the cast is appropriate, even endearing.

Director Jack Lush has taken some liberties with the script. A snippet of T.S. Eliot's "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" finds its way into the show as do memories of favorite non-1955 presents such as a Game Boy and a computer desk.

Scenic artist Karen McKenzie contributes a suitably fantastical background. It is a winter seascape that could be a collaboration between two artists, one from Victorian England and the other from 18th-century China.

Stone Soup is at 4035 Stone Way N. "A Child's Christmas in Wales" runs there through Dec. 23. Tickets are $14, groups of four or more $10 per ticket; 206-633-1883 or stonesouptheatre.com.

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