Spread the Love: The Merrie Christmas Show by Lindsay Price

This week on Spread the Love, Lindsay and Craig talk about The Merrie Christmas Show, a Christmas play by Lindsay Price.

Transcript

Welcome to Spread the Love where it’s not the 12 days of Christmas but a whole month.

Wow!

August is Christmas month here at Spread the Love and today it’s The Merrie Christmas Show. And that’s M-E-R-R-I-E as in medieval as in a troupe of travelling players have come to town armed with Christmas stories from far and wide. Craig what do you love about The Merrie Christmas Show.

I have a very special place in my heart for The Merrie Christmas Play. Lindsay and I used to perform this play, with just the two of us playing all the parts. The script has been reworked to accommodate a much larger cast but the intimacy of storytelling is still there. Now what I love is that the play is based on traditional Christmas stories, but they aren’t really the stories that you’re probably familiar with. Some of them I might say are a little bit odd.

We have trouble with that. We always go with the odd.

I mean, how many traditional Christmas stories do you know that feature a lamprey pie which is an eel pie as in the fish, eel.

Lindsay, what do you love about The Merrie Christmas Show?

I too have very very fond memories of this play. It’s very silly. There are lots of silly chants: “Yule Yule Yule, Three puddings in a pool!” There are lots of silly villains: (singing) “Rupert. He’s hairy and he’s scary. Rupert. He’s never, ever merry. Rupert won’t be bringing out any toys, when he visits all the bad girls and boys. There are lots of silly songs, many more where that came from. There is just a lot of joy and merriment and storytelling, and there’s no better time for joy, and merriment and a good story and a lot of silly,

And eel pie,

And eel pie – I’m not going to eat the eel pie, I’m going to pass on that thank you – than at Christmas time. That’s it for Spread the Love.