A Christmas Carol: Online (2020)

It has been a great privilege to be your Scrooge for these 27 years. And a great surprise. No actor expects to be playing the same role for so long. And so my thanks to all of you who, over many years, have made our Christmas Carol tradition a part of your family’s annual celebration. And to those newcomers to our show...Welcome! If I have learned anything in playing this wonderful role it is simply this...we all make mistakes in life but we never lose the chance to be able to change and advance from darkness to light. Many of you have shared with me your own stories of being moved by Scrooge’s journey. As an actor, to know that you may have touched someone and made an impact in their life is a humbling thing. And not something I take lightly. But that is why actors and audiences come together in a darkened room...to share, to laugh, to cry and to learn from each other. Thanks to all of you for allowing me to be a part of this remarkable journey.

FOR THEATRE CALGARY: A Christmas Carol (2019), The Two Gentlemen of Verona (Shakespeare by the Bow), Blow Wind, High Water.

ELSEWHERE: Mx., These Four Walls (Alberta Queer Calendar Project, Cardiac Theatre), Where the Two-Spirit Lives (Intrepid Theatre, The Cultch, Theatre Outré), Woven Waters (Found Festival), HKAAHSINONIKS (Making Treaty 7 Cultural Society), Working It Out (WorkPlays).

Marshall is an Actor, Director, Writer, Podcaster, and Drag Performer from the Kainai Nation in Southern Alberta. He graduated from the University of Lethbridge where he received his BFA, specializing in Theatre Performance. He is especially interested in using theatre for community development, having been involved in various projects both locally and internationally aimed at using artistic practices to encourage social change. Marshall can also be found teaching at Trickster Theatre or improvising with the folx at Dirty Laundry. He received the 2018 Stephen Hair Emerging Actor Award and is jazzed to be back at Theatre Calgary.

FOR THEATRE CALGARY: A Christmas Carol (2019). 

Jamie performs as a professional vocalist, actor and movement/circus artist, and has been an active member of the YYC arts community since childhood.  In 2019, Jamie T was honoured to be a co-recipient of the Betty Mitchell Award for Best Ensemble for their work in GIANT by Ghost River Theatre.  Select credits include: Giant (GRT); Iniskim (Canadian Academy of Mask and Puppetry), Modern Times Redux (The Grand YYC); Catalyst Theatre's Fortune Falls (ATP/Citadel); The Drowning Girls (Vertigo); Songs from Nightingale Alley (FoF); Awesome Girl and Radical Boy (Lunchbox); The Toxic Avenger Musical (Broadway West); Evil Dead: the Musical (GZT/H&M); Moon, Moon No Moon and Calgary, I Love You but You're Killing Me (OYR). 

Jamie has spent much of the last year sheltering in place yearning to collaborate but staying creative with crafts, sewing, puppet experiments, and making paintings with inks derived from foraged urban materials. Special heartfelt thanks to all of the amazing people who made it possible to bring this tradition to life with their tenacious adaptation - it is indeed a humbling privilege to share in this story together, this year especially.  Tidings of warm holiday joy to the good humans everywhere taking care of each other at a distance this year, and may we hold each other close in our hearts until we can gather again!

FOR THEATRE CALGARY: Playwright – A Christmas Carol (2019); Actor - Skylight, Much Ado About Nothing.

Geoffrey is a Calgary-based playwright, actor, director, and co-creator of the Major Matt Mason Collective. As a playwright, his work has been produced in Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto, and Montreal. His plays include Destroy, Air, Control, Still Still Still, Michael Mysterious, If I Could Tell You Everything (with the Theatre Junction High School Mentorship Ensemble) and The Circle – which was published by Scirocco Drama in 2017. He is the winner of two Betty Mitchell Awards, Theatre Calgary’s Stephen Hair Emerging Actor Award, and Tarragon’s RBC Emerging Playwright Award. Geoffrey is a graduate of the National Theatre School of Canada’s playwriting program. Love to M, D, A, & E.

FOR THEATRE CALGARY: A Christmas Carol (2019), Billy Elliot the Musical, Mary and Max - A New Musical, The Secret Garden.

ELSEWHERE: Allegiance (Broadway); Ragtime (West End); Carrie (Off-Broadway); Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris (Stratford Festival); Red Velvet (The Old Globe, CA); The Tin Pan Alley Rag (Roundabout Theatre Company, NYC); Altar Boyz (Off-Broadway); bare (Off-Broadway); Candide (San Francisco Symphony); Bowfire (PBS television special); A Tribute to Stephen Sondheim (Boston Pops); Saturday Night (Off-Broadway); Two Class Acts (The Flea Theatre, Off-Broadway); Poster Boy (Williamstown Theatre Festival); Guys and Dolls (Paper Mill Playhouse, NJ); Children’s Letters to God (Off-Broadway); The New World (Bucks County Playhouse, PA); Bright Lights, Big City (Prince Music Theater, PA); The Princess and the Black- Eyed Pea (San Diego Rep); Total Eclipse (Toronto); Spring Awakening – The Musical (UC Davis); and Marry Me A Little (Cincinnati Playhouse). Stafford served as associate director for the Broadway productions of A Class Act and Seussical. He is the Artistic Advisor for Broadway Dreams and an adjunct professor at UC Davis. He studied at York University in Toronto. staffordarima.com

FOR THEATRE CALGARY (selected): A Christmas Carol (lighting – 1999, set & projections – 2019), Billy Elliot the Musical, Mom’s The Word: For Crying Out Loud, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, A Raisin in the Sun, Sherlock Holmes, Crimes of the Heart, Romeo and Juliet, Gaslight.

ELSEWHERE: Disgraced, The New Canadian Curling Club, The Virgin Trial, The Last Wife, 1979 (ATP); Strangers on a Train, Dracula: The Bloody Truth, The Thin Man, The Lonely Diner, Nine Dragons, The Drowning Girls (Vertigo); Eugene Onegin, South Pacific, Die Tote Stadt (Calgary Opera); Our Canada, Class Acts (Alberta Ballet); Better Get Hit in Your Soul, Modern Vaudevillians, Juliet and Romeo (DJD). Scott has also designed for such companies as Quest Theatre, Lunchbox, and The Shakespeare Company.

Katie has worked with Theatre Calgary since 2004 in various different roles and departments. From 2010-2013, she ran away to join Dragone Entertainment in Macau as a Wardrobe Attendant, and got to travel all over South East Asia while there. Currently she is the Assistant Head of Wardrobe at Theatre Calgary, and misses the rest of her Wardrobe Collective greatly.

FOR THEATRE CALGARY: Sound Designer/Composer – A Christmas Carol (2019), The Scarlet Letter; As You Like It, Romeo and Juliet (SBTB 2013); Music Director – A Christmas Carol (2016-19); Actor – A Christmas Carol (2011-2019), The Secret Garden, Dear Johnny Deere, One Man, Two Guvnors. 

ELSEWHERE: Ministry of Grace (The Belfry), Waiting for the Parade, The Red Priest, Ash Rizin’, The Penelopiad (ATP); Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, All’s Well that Ends Well (The Shakespeare Company); Double Indemnity, In the Heat of the Night, Sweeney Todd (Vertigo); Vigilante (NAC/The Grand/Persephone); The Soul Collector (Catalyst); A Dinner Party (Bad Knaps); Fiddler on the Loose (Drayton); A Worthy Opponent (Lunchbox); ONCE (Chemainus); The Piper (Downstage); Thy Neighbor’s Wife, Essay (Urban Curvz); Twisted, Maria Rasputin Presents, But…This IS my Day Job! (Forte). Allison has received three Betty Mitchell Awards for acting and was the proud recipient of the 2011 Stephen Hair Emerging Actor Award. You may have seen her flying on a window for the full eight years of Theatre Calgary's previous production of A Christmas Carol as The Spirit of Christmas Past. Allison is also a Betty-winning and Jesse-nominated sound designer, composer, and musical director, who has designed for ATP, Vertigo, The Arts Club, Lunchbox, Downstage, Ellipses Tree, and Sage, among others. Allison performs across Canada with her jazz trio, and her debut album, Skin & Flame, is available on CD baby, iTunes, Spotify and at allisonlynchmusic.com. She looks forward to the days when we can all gather together in the theatre in-person once again!

FOR THEATRE CALGARY: Director – Romeo & Juliet (SBTB 2020), The Shoplifters; Actor - A Thousand Splendid Suns, The Crucible, A Christmas Carol (2012-14), Enron, To Kill A Mockingbird, Much Ado About Nothing; Program Director for Shakespeare in the Park/Shakespeare by the Bow (2012-20).

OTHER DIRECTING CREDITS: A Thousand Splendid Suns (Arts Club, MTC, The Grand Theatre); Hammered Hamlet, Three Musketeers, Hamlet, Titus Andronicus (The Shakespeare Company); Might as well be Dead: Nero Wolfe (Vertigo); Metamorphoses (University of Calgary); Dracula, Prairie Boy’s Winter, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Mount Royal University); The Hobbit (Storybook); Dracula (Red Deer College).

Jenna is a mixed-race Dramaturg and Director based on Treaty 7. She is the founding Artistic Director of Chromatic Theatre – a company dedicated to producing and developing work by and for artists of colour. Jenna is also the Dramaturg for the Playwrights Lab at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. She is a passionate arts equity advocate, an active member of the Consent and Respect in Theatre (CART) collective; the Vice President of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion for LMDA; and the former Board Chair for Theatre Alberta. Beyond the Banff Centre, Jenna has had the pleasure of dramaturging work at the Kennedy Center, Alberta Theatre Projects, Lunchbox Theatre, Chromatic Theatre and fu-GEN Theatre. Jenna is a graduate of the NTS Artistic Leadership Residency (2020), a graduate from the Banff Centre’s Cultural Leadership Program (2019), a member of the artEquity National Facilitator Training cohort (2018), and a recipient of a 2018 Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Emerging Artists. She holds a MA in International Performance Research from the universities of Amsterdam and Tampere.

FOR THEATRE CALGARY: More than 60 productions since 2000 including Admissions, The Louder We Get, Noises Off, Billy Elliot the Musical, The Scarlet Letter, Mary and Max – A New Musical, Honour Beat, The Secret Garden, Twelfth Night, The Audience, Skylight, Bad Jews, The Crucible, Liberation Days (WCT co-pro), One Man, Two Guvnors, The Mountaintop, Enron, 9 seasons of Shakespeare by the Bow and 15 years of A Christmas Carol.

Jane has also worked for ATP, is the Voice & Dialect Consultant for Vertigo Theatre and the Voice & Text Coach for The Shakespeare Company. She has taught at such institutions as York University, Harvard University, Southern Methodist University, MRU, UofA, and is currently teaching in the Drama Division in the School of Creative & Performing Arts at the UofC.

FOR THEATRE CALGARY: ASM – The Louder We Get, The Secret Garden, Twelfth Night, The Audience, The Light In The Piazza, The Little Prince – The Musical, The Crucible.

Other stage management credits: SensoryBox, Giant (Ghost River); Strangers On A Train, The Thin Man, The 39 Steps, Our Man In Havana, Dial “M” For Murder, Vintage Hitchcock (Vertigo); Naughty But Nice: Six In The City, Crossing Swords, Touch Me: Songs For A (dis)Connected Age, Naughty But Nice Too! (Forte Musical Theatre); In Flanders Fields, Ride, It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play (Lunchbox); Legends Of Country, Million Dollar Quartet, Rumors & Dreams (Stage West); Million Dollar Quartet (Drayton Entertainment); The Patron Saint of Stanley Park (TNW); The Red Priest (ATP); Polygraph (Sage); The Peace Maker (Next Stage Festival). Love to you and yours this holiday season!

FOR THEATRE CALGARY: The Louder We Get.

Elsewhere: All That Binds Us (Azimuth); There Goes the Bride, 80’s Solid Gold 1 & 2, Spamalot, Chicago, Love Train, Fiddler on the Roof, Gameshow (Stage West); The Thin Man, The Hollow (Vertigo); A Love Letter to Emily C, A Chitenge Story, The Tall Building (Handsome Alice); Flight Risk (Lunchbox); Assassinating Thompson (Lunchbox/Inside Out); Filumena, Turandot, South Pacific, Rigoletto, Everest (Calgary Opera); Make Love Not Art (Inside Out); Benefit (Downstage); La Boheme, L'incoronazione di Poppea (Centre for Opera in Italy); Sylvia, Twist & Shout, The Drawer Boy, Frolic!, Tidings (New West Theatre). Kennedy is a proud graduate of the University of Lethbridge's Technical Theatre Program.