Inspecting Carol December 19, 2009

Mix together a struggling theater company, a tired production of A Christmas Carol, a really bad actor and a visiting inspector from the National Endowment for the Arts and you end up with Inspecting Carol, the off-the-wall holiday farce. Everything that could possibly go wrong does as a fictitious theater company struggles to mount their annual production of the holiday classic. Bad theater has never been this much fun before!Daniel Sullivan and the Seattle Repertory Company created Inspecting Carol as an antidote to the endless parade of annual productions of A Christmas Carol. As it developed, the piece also grew into a satiric look at government funding for the arts and how it affects the organizations that receive it.The insanity begins when the company members of a small regional theater mistake a neophyte (and very bad) actor as an inspector from the National Endowment for the Arts. In order to hold onto their funding, the company does everything possible to keep this person happy, including casting him in their production of A Christmas Carol and letting him rewrite large sections of the story. When the real inspector shows up, the company is forced to perform what can charitably be called the worst production ever of the Dickens classic. The ghosts of Christmas past, present and future forget their lines, Bob Cratchit throws out his back trying to carry Tiny Tim, Jacob Marley gets tangled in his chains, Mrs. Cratchit becomes a vampy sex kitten, Scrooge begins to speak his lines in Spanish to protest U.S. policy in Central America and the stage manager is stricken with an uncontrollable fit of the giggles all before things really begin to go wrong!Tickets: Tickets will go on sale in October.