![]() ![]() "Because we designed this show specifically for the regional market, these are the people we want to be playing to. "We decided to coincide our presentation with the festival so the regional artistic directors coming in for the whole event could have a chance to catch it," said the show's producer, Jayson Raitt, who is shepherding the work with fellow producer Brannon Wiles. A Christmas Memory was not part of the NAMT festival, per se - just a side benefit for the early arrivals. 26 in Manhattan, welcoming regional-theatre delegates who attended the National Alliance for Musical Theatre's 23rd Annual Festival of New Musicals Oct. The show was seen in a 45-minute industry presentation Oct. Human Race Theatre in Dayton, OH, gave the show an earlier reading and is considering the title for a future full production. "It remains on my short list of 'shows I want to produce,' whether it is Christmas in December or June," said Human Race producing artistic director Kevin Moore. ![]() This year a whole new production will play the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in Montgomery, Nov. ![]() Penny Fuller starred as Sook when this musicalized memoir world-premiered a year ago at TheatreWorks in Palo Alto, CA. Thirty years later, it returned to television as a two-hour Hallmark special starring Patty Duke, adapted and expanded by Duane Poole, who has now authored a new libretto for its latest reincarnation - as a musical, with lyrics by Carol Hall and music by Larry Grossman. In 1967, a 50-minute TV edition, adapted and narrated by Capote himself, won cheers, tears and two Emmys (for its teleplay and for Geraldine Page's exquisite performance). She is Sook, a lovely loon of an old lady, signaling the start-up of much holiday hustle-and-bustle for herself and her best bud and distant cousin, seven-year-old Buddy (i.e., the boy Capote), in rural Alabama of The Depression.Ĭapote's tender recall of this special friendship first appeared as a short story in Mademoiselle magazine in December 1956 and subsequently enjoyed a variety of multi-media lives. “A Christmas Memory” has attained the status of a holiday classic, with television adaptations appearing in 19."Oh, my, it's fruitcake weather," announces the fruitcake-in-residence in Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory" one frosty morn about this time of year some 80 autumns ago. In recounting this odd couple’s dedicated holiday preparations-which include baking 31 fruitcakes to give away to their eccentric collection of friends, felling and decorating an enormous Christmas tree, and exchanging handmade kites-the story reveals the sustaining love shared between two social outsiders. “A Christmas Memory” returns to the rural Alabama setting of the author’s childhood to recount a magical Christmas season shared between the seven-year-old “Buddy” and his cousin, who is in her sixties (and to whom Buddy, the narrator, refers only as “my friend”). ![]() A midcentury author with a clear and evocative prose style, Capote is remembered for his novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) and for his groundbreaking work of true-crime nonfiction, In Cold Blood (1966). Originally published in Mademoiselle magazine in December 1956, “A Christmas Memory” remains one of Truman Capote’s (1924-1984) most anthologized short stories. ![]()
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