Created on the fly, in full acknowledgment that sometimes it can be difficult to get people to buy tickets to theater shows they’ve never heard of, A Texas Carol at A.D. Players last year was the surprise success of the 2022 Houston holiday season.
So as Jayme McGhan, the executive artistic director of A.D. Players figured it, why not do it again. And they will — starting November 22.
“It did extremely well. It went significantly above our projections, sales. And audiences leftwith big smiles on their face and there were almost immediately calls for us to do it again,” he said. “The play has a certain Texas charm that people in Houston glom onto certainly but it also has a really big heart. It’s a family divided and they’re just trying to figure out their way in a space where they just don’t know what to do.”
Other than A Christmas Carol and The Nutcracker, live performance venues often have trouble deciding whether to go with a holiday-themed show and whether it will work with their audiences. A.D. Players did had commissioned Christmas Shoes the year before and McGhan said it did all right but not as well as they’d hoped. And they thought they needed something more joyful.
So he and Artistic Director Kevin Dean and with just 24 hours to go till their annual show, knocked outa title. Not a new show. A title.
Describing their thought process, McGhan said: “OK, we’re going to write something. We’ve just got to come up with the title to start and then we’ll write something later. So within 24 hours, right before our gala , we just sat down. It’s got to be regionalism, it’s got to be funny, it’s got to be something that’ll sell, that people will want to come to. We came up with 20, 30 different options, then A Texas Carol. Thee you go.
“So we didn’t have a show. We didn’t have a premise. We had nothing except for a title and we said all right, here we go.”
Part of their inspiration the success of a theater in Minneapolis that took the regionalism of Minnesota and attached it to a Christmas story. “That thing sold like gangbusters and it still sells out every year.”
So they thought they’d follow that model. “It was a bit of a risk, at the risk of offending some folks who are more advanced in years with Mee-Maw passing at the beginning of the show but within the first preview we went ‘Oh yeah, this is going to work.'”
Thanks to an intriguing plot with shades of Weekend at Bernie’s, a family arrives to gather at their East Texas ranch to celebrate Christmas with 93-year-old Mee-Maw. Only she dies right before they come in for the meal. Granddaughter Greta finds her dead in bed. She tells her brother Erik but the two decide not to tell anyone else. Turns out the rest of the family arrives with more baggage than they’re carrying in their hands and why make an already tense situation worse?
“Obviously you have a funny conceit with Mee-Maw passing away before they even get there,” McGhan said. “A matriarch of the family who really pays close attention and loves her family dearly and knows that she’s going to pass and so she’s able to figure out a way to offer gifts that will be a little bit Balm of Gilead that it’s not going to solve all the problems but it will help get them moving forward.”
Plans are underway to develop a sequel and eventually a trilogy. “We’ve already got the outlines for what we want to do with these folks and we hope to be able to offer the sequel next year and the trilogy the third year.”
“The idea is that we have a trilogy that we can run three years in a row that people can see it, return and hopefully be enamored by these folks and follow their journeys.
Performances are scheduled for November 22 through December 23 at at the George Theater, 5420 Westheimer. For more information, call 713-526-2721 or visit adplayers.org. $34-$62.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
