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Manual Cinema’s Christmas Carol

In this world premiere online event created for audiences of all ages, interdisciplinary performance collective Manual Cinema takes on Charles Dickens’ holiday classic with a visually inventive adaptation made to broadcast directly to your home. An avowed holiday skeptic, Aunt Trudy has been recruited to channel her late husband Joe’s famous Christmas cheer. From the isolation of her Chicago apartment, she reconstructs his annual Christmas Carol puppet show – over a Zoom call while the family celebrates Christmas Eve under lockdown. But as Trudy becomes more absorbed in her own version of the story, the puppets take on a life of their own, and the family’s call transforms into a stunning cinematic adaptation of Dickens’s classic ghost story.

World premiere performances of Manual Cinema’s Christmas Carol are December 3-20, 2020. Each show will be performed live in Manual Cinema’s Chicago studio in a socially distanced manner, and live streamed to audiences at home, including to Texas Performing Arts audiences on December 19-20. The stream will be delivered by Marquee TV. In signature Manual Cinema fashion, hundreds of paper puppets, miniatures, silhouettes and a live original score will come together to tell an imaginative re-invention of this cherished holiday classic.

Manual Cinema’s Christmas Carol - Trailer from Texas Performing Arts on YouTube.