by Maran van den Oord
It’s cold outside, lights are everywhere to be found, and the market square is home to a huge pine tree once again. This can mean but one thing: Christmas is coming. But more importantly, THEATRA’s Christmas plays are just around the corner! Devils, ghosts, and prisoners; these plays (and one musical) have it all. Do you like hell, family, and sacrifices? Are you obsessed with capes, Charles Dickens, and British accents? Do you love a combination of music, crime, and drama? Then buy your tickets this week during the lunchbreak in Elliott! (Like, seriously, tickets for UCR students are €3, you deserve a fun night out).
As always, our three plays have been written by UCR students. Since the summer holidays we have been scouting for young, talented playwrights and I dare say that we found some real gems, a big shout-out to everyone who sent something in! Picking which plays to perform was a hard task, but we are super happy with the results. Not convinced to come to the performance yet? Then, maybe a little snippet of each play will help:
Helly Holidays – A little boy with strong opinions about what makes someone naughty or nice, spends Christmas morning in the company of Satan 😈 Will his family be able to get to Hell and bring little Timmy home?
One More Carol – What if Ebenezer Scrooge had a daughter and she was even worse than him? When all conventional methods to help her change her ways fail, Ebenezer reaches out to three friends from the past to help him out…👻
Tally – He is an undercover writer. They are the best prison crew in existence. We bring you the magic of Christmas in prison. This musical promises comedy, drama, romance, and of course, most importantly, many great musical numbers!
Doesn’t that sound exciting?
We have been rehearsing our butts of since the fall break and it has been amazing to see the plays develop every single week. Lines were learned, scenes were rehearsed, and songs were harmonized. As each year, the actors in the musical have had multiple extra rehearsals to perfect that one scene/dance/song, and the actors in the plays have worked very hard to make every scene absolutely perfect. During rehearsals there was no time to sit still: if you were not in a scene you helped out with props and costumes. Outside of rehearsals many people spent time on making props, gathering costumes, designing PR material and baking delicious things for our bake sales. These have been an intense few weeks, but it’s not over yet! To put on the best show of our lives for you guys we will keep rehearsing until the last possible moment.
It has been an absolute pleasure to work with this amazing cast and we know that they will shine on stage like the stars they are!
Tickets are being sold for 3 euros in Elliott every lunchbreak, so come by and treat yourself to this awesome event. We hope to see your happy, intrigued, laughing and crying faces in the audience, December 5th!
Maran van den Oord, Class of 2020, is a Cognitive Science, Linguistics, and Psychology Major from Leiden, the Netherlands
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Image Source: theatra promotion poster
