(Not) "Alas, poor Yorick"

... but "Break a leg, Andre."
If only he still had one.

As a child, Andre Tchaikowsky lived through the Holocaust. In 1982, he died at age 46 from cancer.
Recently, he appeared with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

That's because, in his will, he specified that he wanted his skull used onstage during a performance of a particular scene in *Hamlet."
He got his wish, reports Simon de Bruxelles in the Times of London. But not any longer.

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]