A Christmas Miscarriage

I've been breathing theatre since I was a babe. I traveled in the back of my parents tour bus when I was less than a year old, and have dedicated most of the following years to living as an actor. In all those long years, I have never witnessed anything as horrendous as the miscarriage of human decency that occurred at Birmingham Children's Theatre on Friday afternoon.
With less than two weeks left in rehearsal for A Christmas Carol, Birmingham Children's Theatre's board of directors had the suicidal gall to fire our director, and artistic director of BCT, Jamie Lawrence. This a terrible move for the theatre and for the show, which they now intend to put up with a new script and a new director. They have sliced the jugular of the only chance they had at putting up any worthwhile theatre, and replaced it with a wild pipe dream. They are under the assumption that in less than the time it takes a Summer Stock production to take shape, they will pull a visually spectacular extravaganza out of their own asses. Not only do they believe this, but they believe they will do it with no money. BCT is massively in debt, the reason they had commissioned our pared down, back to roots version of Christmas Carol to begin with.

None of this is the main reason why I am so incensed. In the end BCT made a business decision, a tremendously delusional and stupid business decision, but that is their right. What they did not have the right to do was treat Jamie Lawrence with such terrible indignity. They waited until we had begun our rehearsal and then called Jamie away to the office to fire him. While he was there, fighting for his job, they gathered us to the stage where we all sat silent and uncomfortable under the watchful gaze of some financial lizard in a power-tie. None of us knew this man, and his presence in our midst was disturbing. After more than a few minutes of waiting like a problematic grade-schooler for the principal, Jamie was paraded back into the room to announce his firing to us all, and then Lizard Tie assured us that we all still had a job if we wanted it. Of course we all still have a job! You're stuck with no cast if we leave!

Well, I walked off the show, and so did a lot of the cast. You cannot take a production away from a director this close to an opening. It's bad business, but mostly its bad humanity. Jamie is a man I have come to respect and admire in only a few weeks, and had done nothing to merit being fired other than to try and produce a show within his budgetary means that would still be worth seeing. A show that, by most accounts, would have been superior to most of the recent productions of A Christmas Carol in Birmingham.

On top of it all, this is a show about Christmas Spirit, about humbling yourself before your fellow man, about generosity. What better way to get that message to the kids than by firing a man with two kids at Christmas time. Many of the staff at BCT feel that they are being kept on only so that the money from A Christmas Carol can be made, and that they will all be fired as soon as the show is over. Scrooge himself would have a hard time keeping pace with such misanthropic greed.

There is more to say, but I am not the person to say it. I have not been here long enough, and I do not know the history. You should know this: If you attend Birmingham Children's Theatre's A Christmas Carol this year, you will be paying for shoddy, rushed work while supporting the board of director's atrocious behavior.