What a delightful afternoon! The kids and I really enjoyed ourselves.
- audience member
For the first time this year Scholars Baroque Aoteroa hosted this free family event with the generosity of St Peter’s Anglican Church, Mount Maunganui, where the event was held on Sunday afternoon, 9th December. The new Vicar Christine Scott welcomed us. It was a beautiful warm and sunny summer evening in the Antipodes, the exact opposite of the biting cold and short, gloomy, foggy winter days in London where the tale was set.
The wonderful readers were James Tubbs, a Mt Maunganui parishioner, Greg Brownless, our mayor, and Mr Denis Gordon, of the wider community. How well enjoyed Denis’ reading was. He really brought the story with its characters to life. We were spellbound as they drew us, with such expressiveness of drama, humour and pathos, into the story of Ebenezer Scrooge and how the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come changed his cynical mind about Christmas and turned his cold, selfish heart outward toward his fellow man.
I never wavered with my attention on the readers. It was good to have different voices. I always had thought of A Christmas Carol as a bit of Victorian drivel, and never read it before now. I had not expected such funny moments!
- audience member
To start and finish, and to give us some respite between the ghostly visitors, we sang together and with great gusto quintessential Victorian Christmas carols such God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen and Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly.
Charles Dickens would have approved as the assembled crowd dispersed with a vibrantly re-kindled Christmas spirit and a warmth of feeling for others. In the words of tiny Tim Cratchett, “ God Bless us, one and all!”
