The Unicorn offers up Ebenezer Scrooge’s Big KC MO Christmas Show as holiday hooliganism on your way to the bar
Photo by Don Ipock
Kansas City does not lack for annual holiday traditions. It can probably be said double so for the theater community, where each season brings with it a handful of recurring shows that are consistently excellent. The thing of it is, there’s apparently always space for more.
Productions like Milking Christmas and Electric Poe have carved out their high placements alongside extended traditional offers like It’s a Wonderful Life, The Nutcracker, and, especially, versions of A Christmas Carol.
Despite my internal ‘bah humbuging’ at the idea of yet another stage production of well-worn holiday territory, The Unicorn has delivered on not just a banger of an Xmas revue, but one that I hope becomes a staple.
Gordon Greenberg & Steve Rosen’s play Ebenezer Scrooge’s Big KC MO Christmas Show is, as advertised, a localized retelling of the 181 year-old Dickens tale. Set in a KC of yore, a J. C. Nichols-ish version of Scrooge is working his lone employee into the night on Christmas Eve, while mocking local do-gooders and avoiding his nephew. In the night, the spirit of his former business partner summons three ghosts to recalibrate the miser’s life. The Ghost of Christmas Past takes him back to England, where he was picked last in sports and drove away the love of his life. The Ghost of Christmas Present drags Scrooge to assorted Christmas parties. The Ghost of Christmas Future—a terrifying disembodied antagonist—revels in revealing the dire fate of all involved. A changed man, Scrooge wakes up on the holiday morning and makes good on pivoting to local hero.
While the story beats of the show obviously hew closely to the original text, the energy of the experience is decidedly original. The KC-centric aspects take shots at the stadium tax, streetcar, and even the theatre itself. The references all land naturally in what could have easily felt like local color for local color’s sake—and there is both enough in place to earn its local bona fides but not too many as to make its own self-reference the point.
Actor Ron Megee’s take on Ebenezer Scrooge is nothing short of magic. After a ghostlight introduction sequence, Megee takes centerstage and transforms into the lead, twisting his body into the form he’ll occupy for the rest of the night—the embodiment of reptilian slime, leeching his way across the stage and forcing the fates to drag his shape across time.
Photo by Don Ipock
The rest of the familiar, talented local faces (Steven Eubank, Teisha M. Bankston, Jessica Dressler, Francisco “Pancho” Villegas) quickly settle into a dynamic of shared footing with Megee. Much of the joy that elevates this show into that pantheon of “I can’t wait to see that again” lives in the looseness and thrill that the cast has playing off each other. At points, they break when the show allows for someone to drift off script. At other times, the show or the audience themselves are welcomed into a kind of roast, where Big KC MO Christmas Show is almost pranking its players.
The blend of a great script with talent unafraid to use the space to be explicitly themselves into just such a winning chemistry, the staging feels singular amid its holiday stage peers.
Directed by Ernie Nolan, Ebenezer Scrooge’s Big KC MO Christmas Show runs at The Unicorn Theatre [3828 Main St.] through December 22, 2024. Tickets are available here.
