Thanks to Actors' Playhouse, a Grinch gets the Christmas spirit

By Patrick Alexander

As an elderly curmudgeon, I thought I would have no problem turning down an evening’s entertainment titled Another Night Before Christmas. Who on Earth would want to spend an evening with such a Grinch as me? And yet somehow there I was, accompanying my wife at the Actors’ Playhouse at the Miracle Theatre in Coral Gables for an evening of dramatic “seasonal saccharin.” I did not want to be the Grinch, but I knew this was exactly the sort of entertainment that I most despised.

I assumed that sitting in a deserted theatre, confronted with some embarrassing display of Yuletide excess, would quickly provoke my wife into saying, “This is really tacky. Why don’t we go visit one of those gentlemen’s clubs that I read about in New Times?” Just as I was preparing myself to make a dignified response and agreeing that Alley Cats is within the Gables city limits and thus worthy of our patronage, the curtains drew aside on a classically bare stage with a couple of obviously earnest actors in a Christmas play with a “feel-good” plot structure that could have been written by the audience.

All my worst fears were justified. The fact that the theatre rapidly filled and was soon a full house did nothing to change my initial concern that I was soon to wallow in a post-Dickens/Disney excess of cheap emotions. But possibly because we knew exactly where the plot was leading us, we ignored the actors. There were only two, after all – but in fact they were both wonderful.

Their roles were limited. One was female, cynical and basically anti-Christmas. The other was male, plump, and of a jolly if perhaps reflective disposition – named Chris Kringle.

The whole, almost three-hour show was based on just two actors, and they carried their audience for the whole, intense duration. After sneering at the very concept of such a predictable plot, I am so filled with admiration for actors who can take me away from myself and make me end the evening with such real, live wet tears in my eyes that I feel compelled to sit up late at night to persuade everybody who has not yet seen it to go to Another Night Before Christmas.

We are lucky to live in Coral Gables; we are lucky to have Actors’ Playhouse. We are especially lucky to have such nuanced actors such as Irene Adjan and Ken Clement who have turned what could otherwise have been just a sentimental old seasonal chestnut into a thoughtful, careful and brilliantly acted play that makes theatre lovers so happy to live here, in South Florida, where daily life itself is pure drama!