My wife Anne amid the reimagined snowscape of Victorian London.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: we don’t patronize live theater nearly often enough. Sure, we’ve visited New York City twice and strolled among those bright Broadway lights to catch popular favorites like The Lion King and Wicked. As for local theater here in Indianapolis…we’ve been shamefully negligent. My high school English classes took the occasional field trip to the Indiana Repertory Theatre — our most celebrated performance venue, but hardly our only stage — where my poor teenage self (whose family otherwise could never afford such extravagances) had the permission-slipped privilege to see productions of Macbeth (in minimalist postmodern with translucent walls), Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s comedy The Rivals (original source of “malapropism”, a useful word to fans of The Office), and Julius Caesar (starring no less an American celebrity than Family Ties‘ Michael Gross). My last engagement was thirty-three years ago.

Fast-forward to today: Anne and I had been discussing our omissions of local cultural experiences when an opportunity came up this holiday season: free tickets to the IRT’s annual performance of A Christmas Carol, courtesy of my employer (one of their nonprofit organization’s longtime sponsors). We kept our calendar clear, took advantage of the offer, and enjoyed a Christmas activity that for once had nothing to do with crowded family gatherings or big-screen movies with snow in them.

Our pre-matinee stroll around downtown Indianapolis took us around such sights as the holiday window displays of our local electric company.

Candy shopping at Rocket Fizz, my favorite place to pick up stocking stuffers.

Washington Street sadly had more empty storefronts than ever. A few have been put to alternative use.

Our destination: the Indiana Repertory Theatre, housed since 1980 in the Indiana Theatre, built in 1927.

The official poster for our feature presentation.

In terms of square footage, the lobby seemed much smaller than it did in my teen memories, but the vaulted ceiling still impresses.

A Christmas Carol selfie station, possibly painted in a previous year with a few actors different than the cast we saw.

It seemed miraculous when I called the box office to redeem our vouchers two weeks before showtime, a pair front-row seats were available at stage right. This was our pre-show view, no zooming or ducking around other heads.

Of course no photos or video were allowed of the performance itself. A concentrated ensemble of eight actors played all the parts, alternating between their respective dialogue and tag-teaming Dickens’ original narration — sometimes solo, sometimes in unison, volleying ye olde charming verbiage back and forth in nimble merriment. (Some passages could’ve been accurate Dickens homages rather than verbatim transcription. It wasn’t my job to bring a paperback and monitor for comparison.)

All performers were wonderfully animated as they shifted gears from one character to the next, leading to a fun game later of deducing which of the octet was playing the masked, mummified, needle-nailed, disturbingly spindly Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in that dark segment. Among our favorites, Sean Blake (who had a recurring role on season 4 of Fox’s Empire) reigned beneath a bramble-spiked crown as an audaciously fabulous Ghost of Christmas Present, and the core was Rob Johansen in his sixteenth performance of Ebezener Scrooge himself (out of his 52 total IRT shows to date). Cantankerous at the start, his humbuggy miser is soon cowed as each spirit takes their turn whisking him around England’s corner of the space-time continuum and letting events outside his home unfold, then shame, teach, and ultimately humble him. By the final act he’s not merely seen the light — as his heart has expanded, it finally has room for a sense of humor at his own expense, which Johansen leans into with a keen sense of comic reaction with dashes of slapstick.

Witnessing such performances in person without camera trickery or edited do-overs is an entirely different treat from art-minded pop-culture comestibles taken in at a screen’s remove. One side effect of that immediacy would soon explain why our two precise seats had been initially vacant. On stage with trapdoors and other surprises strategically built in, obscured by the dunes in front of us was a hatch tailor-made for surprise emergence. Our first clue of interactivity-yet-to-come came during the opening remarks from a pair of IRT officials, who mostly spent their time thanking the many sponsors who make the theater’s artistic contributions to Indy society possible. One of them casually cautioned front-row attendees we were sitting in their version of an amusement park splash zone: it was entirely possible we might get snowed on during the two-hour show. For emphasis, she scooped up a handful of fake snow and hurled it directly at Anne and me.

As the Carol sleighed onward, every time that unseen hatch slammed open in front of us, a fresh wave of faux flakes swathed us dead-on. At intermission a little fell off us as we moved around and fetched snacks, but I refused to dust myself off intentionally like some kind of humorless square. I left those little punchline souvenirs cling to me as long as possible. We were, in our own tiny way, part of the performance. Why would we shake all that off? And give up showbiz?

This was much cooler than sitting too closely to our zoo’s dolphin shows and getting drenched.

Practical special effects at our very feet.

Obviously we must do this again sometime, maybe even catch a play that doesn’t necessarily teach a very special lesson about holiday spirit, charity, or goodwill toward one and all. We definitely shouldn’t wait another thirty-three years till our next outing. Granted, it’s not as though all that fake snow will have melted by then, but still.

God bless us, every one!