Yesterday at Never Ending Books, the largest Play in a Day gang yet assembled staged an epic 12-minute adaptation of Ben Jonson’s 1614 social satire Bartholomew Fair. One of Jonson’s greatest comedies, the play is renowned for its lack of a coherent plot, something we certainly honored here. We made sure to keep the fourth-wallbreaking introductory remarks by the stage manager, the puppet show interlude and the climactic vomiting bit.

As with all previous Plays in a Day, this production was conceived, designed, rehearsed and performed in the space of three hours. Including the building of the puppets!

It has already been decided that the next Play in a Day will be just one week from now, Jan. 6 (a school holiday thanks to Three Kings Day) from 2-5:15 p.m. at Never Ending Books, 810 State St., New Haven. For details and videos of previous productions, visit the NHTJ Play in a Day page here.

The Archers, the British radio soap opera I’ve been stuck on for over ten years—and which has been around for 60—goes all play-within-a-play every year or so, with subplots about the rural village of Ambridge’s hallowed holiday pageant. This entertainment has taken many forms. This year it’s a dinner-theater revue of “Christmas Around the World.” As ever, the self-appointed arbiter of culture in Ambridge, Lynda Snell, has organized the show.
In past years, the suspense has involved finding an audience or wondering if a set piece will pass inspection. This year it was whether the resident Latin scholar Jim Lloyd would get the projection equipment he insisted upon for an oration which was bound to bore the crowd anyway, and whether barcrawling ladies’ man Jazzer would belt out a vulgar drinking song or something more delicate during his time at the mic.

The Christmas concert episode, which aired yesterday (Wednesday Dec. 28), is here.

The full version of the song Jazzer ultimately sings is here

Ryan Kelly, who joined the Archers cast as Jazzer in 2000, has a special distinction: the actor has been blind since birth yet plays a sighted character, a rowdy Scottish milkman and pig-tender at that. Kelly’s just been interviewed on the BBC series In Touch, which covers issues concerning the blind. That show is here.

The Archers’ spin-off series, Ambridge Extra on BBC Radio 4 Extra, also featured a Christmas pageant recently—a school one, where one of the students accused Jim Lloyd’s upstanding veterinarian son Alistair of propositioning her. Much seamier than the elder Archers series, and much less devoted to the process of putting on a show.

On Jan. 11, one night before its spring semester line-up begins in earnest, the Yale Cabaret is presenting a special one-night engagement of Yale College alum Holcombe Waller, the introspective yet theatrically inclined singer/songwriter/producer who originally hails from California and now lives and works in Oregon.

Earlier this month, Waller debuted Surfacing, which he described to OregonLive.com as “an hour-length, meta-theatrical singspiel-style pop opera,” at Portland’s BodyVox Theater. His previous multidisciplinary stage productions include Into the Dark Unknown: The Hope Chest and the Patty Griffin/Townes Van Zandt mash-up Patty Heart Townes.

Describing the album version of Into the Dark Unknown in an interview on Salvatore Bono’s Officially a Yuppie blog,

Waller says, “One thing you do in theater is there are a lot of smoke and mirrors. You do not have a lot of money, you don’t have a lot of lighting, you don’t have a lot of people, but you want to make it this huge show. And there are the tricks you learn to do that and it’s a lot about what you don’t see and it’s a lot about the elements that you bring in and how they interact with each other,” Waller says about arranging the record and getting its sound to exactly what he wanted, drawing on his theater lessons and creative side, he got the album to sound the way it should. “When I was arranging the record, I was drawing on that from theater, how to make a big majestic moment with just five people.”

Holcombe Waller was part of a rare and precious music scene on the Yale campus in the mid-‘90s, from which sprung not just Waller but The National, Clogs, Mia Doi Todd and other fragile, full-blown acts of musical merit which fell outside the barriers of the reigning jam and punk gaggles of the era.

While at Yale, Waller was a member of the Duke’s Men, the current edition of which will appear as his opening act at the Cabaret. Also performing: Laura Gragtmans, the Yale School of Drama student who co-starred as the nurse in the Cabaret’s stage adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona last October and its production of Young Jean Lee’s Church in November.

The Jan. 11 performance begins at 9:30 p.m. in the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park St., New Haven. Tickets are $10 in advance, $15 at the door.

Doing another idiosyncratic “Play in A Day” project with whichever kids show up, Thursday Dec. 29 from 2-5 p.m. at Never Ending Books, 810 State St., New Haven. We adapt, design and rehearse a classic theater piece in just three hours, then perform the results when the parents arrive to bring their children home.

All kids are welcome. Fee is five bucks per child. I don’t figure out what we’re doing until I see the potential cast materialize.

Details, and videos from previous Play in a Day productions, are here. For even more info, contact chris@scribblers.us. Or just show up.

Here’s a backstage moment from our last production, Gozzi’s Love of Three Oranges.

Photo by Phil Fisk of the current Royal National Theatre production of Alan Ayckbourn’s Season’s Greetings, with (left to right) Marc Wootton, Mark Gatiss, Oliver Chris, Neil Stuke, Nicola Walker and Catherine Tate. A 25-year-old radio adaptation of the 31-year-old play, with a completely different cast, is being aired this week on BBC Radio Four Extra.

My favorite internet radio station, BBC Radio 4, is broadcasting its 1986 radio adaptation of Alan Ayckbourn’s 1980 dysfunctional family comedy Season’s Greetings. Peter Vaughan and Nicky Henson star in the 90-minute production, directed by Micahel A. Simpson. available via a “Listen Now” function through Sunday, here.

The ten-character play, a sort of kindly British precursor to dire modern family dramatic gatherings such as August: Osage Country, takes place on Christmas Eve, then Christmas Day, then Boxing Day, then Dec. 27. It involves constant arguments, adultery, a presumed-fatal shooting and puppets.

The original production ran for a couple of years, and has had numerous revivals, including one happening right now at the Royal National Theatre in London.

I dig out a version of this immortal sketch from Peter Cook & Dudley Moore’s Good Evening (aka Behind the Fridge) to watch or listen to every year at this time. You can find a tidy short rendition of “Gospel Truth” on the show’s soundtrack album or on the episode of Saturday Night Live which Cook & Moore hosted on Jan. 24, 1976 (during SNL’s very first season.) The embedded video below shows a somewhat awkwardly lenghthened take on “Gospel Truth,” from an Australian TV special.At the very least, it demonstrates without doubt the influence Cook & Moore had on the Monty Python troupe.

Happy holidays, and thanks for reading New Haven Theater Jerk. We’ve hit a bit of a lull in the local theater season. Luckily, I have enough lists, book reviews and random insights to fill the gap. Keep checking in.

From the current, Christmas-spirited issue of World of Archie Double Digest (#12, Jan. 2012). You know how this is going to end—the Riverdale students’ outlandish solutions to real-life education crises give Betty fodder for her Drama Club sketch, and inspire mirth, mockery, meditation and ultimately admiration from the school administrators.

Appropriately, my copy has gotten borscht stains on it. Jughead’s proposal that the school foregoes the expense of lunch service and just let the students dig into the boiling pots on the cafeteria stove has a Borscht Belt insanity to it.

It’s Christmas, and for some that means endless talk about American Girls dolls.

The American Girls brand of dolls, novels, videos, clothing, self-esteem manuals and other accessories for the well-heeled, history-literate female child has always been theater-friendly. Some of the American Girls stores have even had their own auditoriums and live musical revues. All the main characters in the series, save for ‘70s hippie child Julie, exist before the invention of television. One of the newer ones, Rebecca, is from a family of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. She is drawn to the vaudeville stage, and then to silent movies.

For a decade or so, the major American Girl stores in New York, Chicago and L.A. had actual performances spaces where American Girl revues and musicals were performed daily. The whole theater operation was shut down in 2008.

In late summer, American Girl debuted two new Louisiana-rooted dolls, Cecile Rey and Marie-Grace Gardner. Of all the American Girls—even the wealthy daughter of the Industrial Age, Samantha; even the budding film star Rebecca—Cecile and Marie-Grace are the most poised and pageantry-oriented. They sashay with the pomp and prissiness of mid-19th century New Orleans.

Of any of the dolls since Molly (the WW2-era American Girl, who overcomes her shyness to perform in USO-type patriotic community revues), Cecile and Marie-Grace are the most deserving of a theater adaptation. Bad timing for them.

Exit the Actress
By Priya Parmar (Touchstone, 2011)

Packaged to look confusingly like a Philippa Gregory or Lauren Willig novel, Exit the Actress has a tone and structures which distinguish it from a lot of mainstream historical romances. Its cast of characters, listed in the front of the book as if you reading a theater program, number in the dozens.

It doesn’t overload you with history, as Gregory tends to. It doesn’t get frilly and silly, which is what I love about Willig’s books. It’s written first-person, common for the form, but as diary entries rather than a long-form confessionals. The entries dart from the heroine’s personal life (from rags to riches, nearly back to rags) to her love life (particularly one professional one as a fine stage actress.

The diary, which pretends to have been penned in the late 17th century but is enlivened by contemporary-sounding exasperations:
“Grumble. I dusted and rinsed this old sea chest twice before setting this book down upon it to write, and I have still managed to get grime on my sleeve.”

There are other ways to be an angel than saving bedraggled building-and-loan guys from suicide.

Long Wharf Theatre is asking audience members, and anybody who happens to stop by the theater, to donate non-perishable foodstuffs which will be distributed to the needy by Connecticut Food Bank.

A press release explains: “People interested in donating can drop off food items at Long Wharf Theatre’s Mainstage from 10 am to 6 pm or the evenings of performances Tuesday through Sunday. The Connecticut Food Bank is looking for particular items, including tuna and other canned meat, peanut butter, Chunky soups and beef stew, macaroni & cheese, spaghetti & sauce, rice, dry & canned beans, canned vegetables and fruits, powdered milk,100% fruit juice (cans, bottles, boxes), and items that are sugar free, low sodium and no salt.”

Lots of theaters do food drives—the Goodspeed had a similar Thanksgiving-timed event during the run of City of Angels. But Long Wharf is actually featuring a mainstage show about charitable gestures. Come to think of it, is also involves a bank.

For info on the good works of Connecticut Food Bank, see ctfoodbank.org; for info on the bad works of Mr. Potter’s Bedford Falls Bank.