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THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY TO PRESENT
CZECHOSLOVAK-AMERICAN MARIONETTE THEATRE IN
"A CHRISTMAS CAROL, OY! HANUKKAH, MERRY KWANZAA"
DECEMBER 26 TO JANUARY 11
WHERE AND WHEN
December 26, 2025 to January 11, 2026
Theater for the New City, 155 First Ave. (at E. 10th Street)
Presented by Theater for the New City
Schedule: Evenings: Thu-Sat @8:00 pm (Dec 26, 27; Jan 1, 2, 3, 8, 9,10)
Matinees: Sun @3:00 pm (Dec 28, Jan 4, 11)
Critics are invited to all performances.
Tickets $18 gen. adm., $12 seniors/students/kids
Come dressed as character of Dickens' Christmas Carol or any seasonal holiday
and use discount code SCROOGE for $2 off all tickets (advance sale and box
office).
Box office 212-254-1109, www.theaterforthenewcity.net
Running time 75 minutes.
Photos: https://photos.app.goo.gl/7eaYStdviUi2FL9S8
NEW YORK, November 14 -- Theater for the New City (TNC) will ring out the
old year with a joyful burst of multicultural mischief as Czechoslovak-American
Marionette Theatre (CAMT) returns December 26 to January 11 with its beloved
holiday mashup, "A Christmas Carol, Oy! Hanukkah, Merry Kwanzaa,"
a Dickens remix adapted, directed and reinvented by Vit Horejs. It features
over 30 exquisitely carved puppets by Milos Kasal including a quartet of Rockettes
in Slovak, Moravian and Ruthenian folk costumes and holiday songs in Czech,
English, Hebrew, Slovak, Spanish and Swahili.
Families looking for an imaginative holiday outing will find it here. The
production made its live TNC debut in 2019 and was offered virtually 2021.
Now playing again for live audiences, the show will be updated to contemporary
sensibilities and restaged for this new TNC production.
The toy-puppet theater extravaganza is a new take on Charles Dickens' classic
with a few twists and digressions. Into the familiar story is woven a surprising
and delightful blend of English, Jewish, African, American and Czech winter
rituals and customs, all performed by over three dozen marionettes ranging
in size from four to twenty-four inches, as well as found objects and toys.
Mr. Horejs operates the whole cast of puppets, backed up by a live chorus:
an "a capella monumentale" choir of Katarina Vizina (a transplant
from Slovakia) and Valois Mickens (West African/Celtic/Native American origin).
The piece is still set in Old London, but with Czech accents. Imagine
that the familiar tale was told to you not by an English serial novelist,
but by your Czech grandmother.
The set uses a century-old toy marionette theater donated by Madeleine Albright.
Vit Horejs uses a Bob Cratchit character from his mother’s identical
set that he played with in his childhood.
There are ghost puppets by Vit Horejs and unknown folk carvers and a Camel
marionette that has played an intruder in several CAMT shows. Set and costume
design are by company member Michelle Beshaw, a two-time Innovative Theatre
Awards winner.
This production first appeared in 2001 at the Jan Hus Playhouse as the lead
show of a "Magic of Czech Puppetry" festival. Its popularity
led to revivals in 2002, 2004, 2005 and 2014. Laurel Graeber (New York
Times) called the show a "delightful holiday hodgepodge that still hews
closely to Dickens's tale and also has contemporary humor." Revisiting
the show in 2005, Graeber declared, " Mr. Horejs's 75-minute unorthodox
mix is always fun," adding, "This is indeed Dickens's story, though
Mr. Horejs's approach is hardly Victorian. Scrooge asks the ghosts whether
he will get frequent-flyer miles, and when Fezziwig, Scrooge's old mentor,
appears, he is singing ‘The Dreidel Song.’ (He explains that his
family name was originally Feinstein.) In Christmas yet to come, Scrooge's
tenants celebrate being free of him with Hebrew songs and menorah-lighting.
At one point, a huge camel marionette arrives." When the production
was presented by La MaMa in 2014, Kelly Aliano (NY Theatre Wire) wrote,
"'Christmas Carol' is exactly what an audience would want from a holiday
show. It tells a familiar tale with an added twist, it reminds us about the
spirit of the season, and it puts a smile on the face of even the scroogiest
of spectators. There is no mention of Tiny Tim's most famous line, but the
overall tone of the show makes everyone lucky enough to have seen it feel
truly blessed indeed." Joel Benjamin (TheaterScene.com) called it "a
refreshing theatrical oasis in the holiday desert of over-ripe TV films, large
Broadway musicals and the Radio City Christmas Show."
ABOUT CZECHOSLOVAK-AMERICAN MARIONETTE THEATER (http://czechmarionettes.org)
Vit Horejs, an emigre from Prague, founded Czechoslovak-American Marionette
Theatre (CAMT) in 1990, utilizing two centuries-old Czech puppets which he
found in the Jan Hus Church on East 74th Street. His trademark is using
puppets of many sizes and styles, from six-inch toy marionettes to twelve-foot
rod puppets which double as scenery. CAMT is dedicated to preserving
and presenting traditional and not-so-traditional puppetry, combining live
performers with puppets. Horejs is well-known for innovative re-interpretations
of classics. He received the Czechoslovak Society for Arts and Sciences
(SVU) 2018 Award in recognition of his lifetime achievement in fostering the
art form of Czech and Slovak Puppetry. In March 2019, he received the
NY Acker Award.
Theater for the New City has presented CAMT in eight productions. "The
Very Sad Story of Ethel & Julius, Lovers and Spyes" explored the
Rosenberg trial with a manipulated set and objects and two toy marionettes
that met their end in electric chairs. Anita Gates wrote in the New
York Times, "Vit Horejs has written and directed a first-rate, thoroughly
original production and made it look effortless. The cast gives charged, cohesive
performances, and the staging is expert." "Revolution!?" (2010)
was a collaboration with three performers from Bohemia and Moravia, examining
revolutions throughout the history of mankind as a backdrop for the extraordinary
peaceful 1989 Velvet Revolution in former Czechoslovakia. "Mr. M"
(2011) was the first American stage adaptation of "Mr. Theodore Mundstock"
by Ladislav Fuks, a postwar Czech writer of psychological fiction. The
production, which continued at the Jewish Community Center of Manhattan, starred
the Grand Dame of Yiddish music scene Adrienne Cooper (1946-2011) in her last
major public appearance. In 2013, puppets and live performers enacted
an enigmatic tale of early World War II in "King Executioner," written
and directed by Vit Horejs, loosely based on "When you are a King, You
will be an Executioner" (1968) by the Polish magical realist novelist
Tadeusz Nowak (1930-1991). In 2015, the company performed "The Magic
Garden, or, The Princess Who Grew Antlers," an ensemble creation that
was cheerfully assembled from Czech fairy tales. In 2017, the company
introduced "Three Golden Hairs of Grandfather Wisdom" and "The
Winter Tales," two plays based on only slightly fractured Czech fairy
tales. An update of the company's signature piece, "Johannes Dokchtor
Faust" (premiere 1990), played to sold-out houses at TNC in 2019.
Vit Horejs writes, "The troupe is excited to return to Theater for the
New City, a venue which embraces new work and enables performances in innovative
styles, like this adaptation, to reach receptive audiences at affordable prices."
Other notable NYC productions include "Golem" (La MaMa, Henson International
Puppetry Festival), "Kacha and the Devil," "The White Doe -
Or The Piteous Trybulations of the Sufferyng Countess Jenovefa," "Don
Juan, or Wages of Debauchery," "Twelve Iron Sandals" and "The
Historye of Queen Ester, King Ahasverus and the Haughty Haman."
CAMT has performed "Hamlet" at the Vineyard Theater, Turkey and
Korea, outdoors in all five boroughs, and at the Prague Summer Shakespeare
Festival in the Lord Chamberlain's Palace Courtyard at Prague Castle.
Its most noted production of "Hamlet" was with four-foot marionettes
on DUMBO's unforgettable landmark, Jane's Carousel, in 2007. "The
Bass Saxophone," a WWII fantasy with music based on a story by award
winning Czech-Canadian writer Josef Skvorecky, played 11 weeks at the Grand
Army Plaza Soldiers' and Sailors' Memorial Arch in Brooklyn in 2005 and 2006.
CAMT has also appeared at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors,
the Winter Garden of the Smithsonian Institution, The World Trade Center (between
the Twin Towers), the Antonin Dvorak Festival in Spillville, Iowa, the Heart
of the Beast in Minneapolis, the Lowell Folk Arts Festival in Massachusetts
and in international festivals in Poland, Pakistan, Hong Kong and the Czech
Republic.
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CRITICS ARE INVITED to all performances.
Photos of this show are available for download at: https://photos.app.goo.gl/7eaYStdviUi2FL9S8