Being fair to Christmas fare

Andy Field in *The Guardian* complains that everything in theater at Christmastime is boring and sentimental.

But Bobo rather likes everything "from *A Christmas Carol* through to *It's a Wonderful Life* [and] *Love Actually.* He'll even admit to having repeatedly and unashamedly "succumbed to the pull of the Capra/Dickens tendency."
It's possible to be too jaded, Andy. Beware the Scrooge who lies within us all.

Anyway, as a prod to those programming alternative Christmas productions for December '09 (and Bobo thinks that local theaters have done a good job in recent years of not simply programming the same old same old), here's a link to an RSC Yule-themed production, Anthony Neilson 's *God in Ruins.*

Added on Dec. 13: A review by Christopher Isherwood in the N.Y. Times of Paula Vogel's new (historica) Yuletide play, "A Civil War Christmas," at the Long Wharf.

[photo: "Drunk Santa" from getoutdoors.com]