The Midnight Train Crossing

I saw a production of A Christmas Story by a First Stage Children’s Theatre. It’s based on the movie, set in the 1940’s in Indiana about Ralphie a (ten year old?) boy who wants a Red Ryder Two-hundred shot Carbine Action Range Model Air Rifle with a compass and a thing that tells time in the stock for Christmas.
I do like the movie, it’s not my favorite movie in the whole wide-world, but the play was excellent!
The movie is narrated by an older Ralphie as he remembers his childhood, and it’s a voice over, but in the play, there was an actor walking around on stage doing the “voice-over”.
The older Ralph was played by Bo Johnson and the younger was by Zach Spaciel. One of the funniest parts of the show would be when the two would do the exact same thing, down to saying the same lines. Sometimes they’d say it together, and sometimes one would mouth it while the other spoke.

The mother was played by Debra Babich, who’s in a lot of plays that my mother and I have seen - she’s one of my mom’s favorite actresses. As usual, she did a great job, particularly in the scenes with the Lamp.

The play opened with a bunch of people in Elf costumes very unenthusiastically singing “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” and then Ralph entered to start telling the story.
Ralphie’s younger brother (Who I think is supposed to be five) was played by Nicholas Aho and he did a brilliant job. Granted, mostly all that Randy does is cry and snort like a pig, but he does have the great scene where he’s so bundled up that he can’t put his arms down.

The father - or “The old man” was funny too, particularly when he was either yelling at the neighbor’s dogs, or the furnace in the basement. They had some rather creative alternatives to swearing - since it is supposed to be a family theatre experience, they couldn’t really do a lot of real swearing.
They used smoke coming up from a grate in the floor to simulate the furnace, and it was very realistic - it smelled like it was coming from a furnace... it sort stunk anyway... and since my mom and I were sitting close, of course that meant that it came right to us.

The actor that played Ralph (adult) also played Red Ryder in a few of Ralphie’s fantasies. Ralphie had a fantasy about his friends being lost in a swamp - “Those Indiana swamps are unforgiving” and he ‘saved’ them from a giant snake... which was rather funny. He fired off-stage and a large snake flopped down onto the stage. :)

One part that was not in the movie was the character of a girl in Ralphie’s class by the name of Esther Jane (Lindsay Chatham) who has a crush on Ralphie. He gave her a rubber tarantula for Christmas and she wore it proudly for the rest of the show.

Of course one of the funniest scenes in the play dealt with the Lamp. For those unfamiliar with the movie, Ralphie’s dad enters a contest and wins a ’fabulous prize’ although his wife could argue with that. It’s a very tacky lamp of a woman’s leg. The leg is wearing a fishnet stocking and a black high-heeled show. The father places it in the front room window for all to see, although his wife is mortified with it.
At the end of the first act, they all head off to see Santa and she shuts the light off, “to save electricity”. As the adult Ralph narrates it, he is cut off by the return of the father, who turns it back on and then leave. Adult Ralph gets about one second further and then is interrupted again by the return of the mother - who shuts it off.

In one of the final scenes of the play, Ralphie performs some very nice slight of hand, because he breaks his glasses - actually he swaps the glasses for a pair of broken ones, but even though I was sitting about two feet from him, I didn’t notice the switch.

One of the other very funny things in the play was every single time Ralph or Ralphie said what he wanted for Christmas it was a “Red Ryder Two-hundred shot Carbine Action Range Model Air Rifle with a compass and a thing that tells time in the stock” The whole long speal, and often times they would say it very quickly. It was great :)

After the show, there was the normal Talk-back, with some pretty standard questions - including how they 7made snow fall.
One of the younger actresses was explaining it, and one of the stage hands decided to be helpful and turn it on, startling the actress, who didn’t expect to get ‘snowed’ on.
The next question was how they got the smoke to come up from the grate - upon which the three kids that were sitting around the grate quickly moved out of the way. So of course, the helpful stage hand had to start up the fog machine as well.

So I think that as funny as the movie is, the play was funnier. And I liked the play quite a bit better then the movie, but then again, for me, that’s pretty normal.