For our holiday issue this week, our Big Ticket covers all the events coming up while the blurbs for the individual events leave festivity-related events alone. It’s a big week for theater, as Stolen Shakespeare Guild puts on White Christmas, a stage adaptation of the 1954 movie, and Casa Mañana goes the Grinchy route and produces Santaland Diaries, David Sedaris’ sarcastic gripe about everything wrong with Christmas, seen from the inside of a department store. Stage West, meanwhile, trots out Jacob Marley’s A Christmas Carol, a one-woman show starring Emily Scott Banks that tells Charles Dickens’ famous story from the point of view of the minor character who appears to him from the afterlife.
Of course, what would Christmas be without The Nutcracker? Texas Ballet Theater’s production, which has been playing the last two weeks in Dallas, takes up its annual residency at Bass Hall right up until the edge of Christmas. Competing with that and Disney’s cracked Nutcracker movie currently in theaters is Ballet Concerto’s holiday special, with pieces about the Nativity, Frosty the Snowman, and a Hanukkah-themed flamenco. The area’s schoolkids will be bused to see this performance free of charge, but a performance open to the public will be held as well.
