A Christmas Carol, from the dance captain’s perspective
Vanessa Severo is one of three Hispanic artists bringing to life A Christmas Carol at the Kansas City Repertory Theatre. For the sixth season, Severo is the dance captain, and marking her eighth year in the production, she’s reappearing onstage, this year animating the characters of Mrs. Fred and a Fezziwig guest. Mia Cabrera and Robin Robles help fill out the youth ensemble.
“Being part of the creative team in this play, seeing all the ways it could work is a dream come true,” Severo says. “You’re given a voice to add your own ingredient to a story that’s over 100 years old.”
In her various roles and as swing and dance captain, Severo has put her charming imprint on the Rep’s Christmas Carol. She’s intimately familiar with the choreography and movement for each dance and its 20 adult dancers, eight children and swings. It’s her job to teach them the moves -- her favorite part of the process.
“I love days when I teach; everyone has such a great time working as a team, making mistakes, figuring out how to fix them and finding joy in learning a traditional art form,” she says.
Severo includes six-to-12-year-olds “because they’re so cute and eager.” And she typically selects two female and two male swings, a dancer who can fill in for an absent performer in any of the dance roles.
“I like to have people on backup because usually when one person gets sick, there’s a ripple effect,” she says. “If both swings get sick, I step in.”
The dance scenes take place in Act 1 on Ebenezer Scrooge’s Christmas Eve journey to confront his past. With his ghostly guide, the miserly old curmudgeon spectrally revisits a Christmas party he attended as a young apprentice, hosted by Fezziwig, his amiable old employer.
“The dance scenes are people just having fun,” Severo says. “The theme is joy, and Ebenezer sees the joy and that he chose to value money more than the people in his life.”
Teaching the 18th century dances -- the waltz, quadrille and polka -- is just the beginning of Severo’s responsibilities as dance captain. It’s her job to oversee and maintain the dance phase and its structure.
“There’s a geometric pattern of people on stage that move in and out of shapes. My job is to make sure the dancers maintain the shapes and patterns and the scenes stay clean and look pretty,” Severo says.
Communicating with the dancers is key because her vantage point backstage or onstage is limited.
“From my angle, the dance scenes can look great, but something could be going wrong on stage left, and I don’t know it.”
This is the Rep’s 36th staging of Charles Dickens’s treasured tale of faith, hope and a transformative change of heart wrought by uninvited phantasmal visitors. Severo has seen it through three directors. She was a swing in A Christmas Carol her first four years with the Rep. When pregnancy prevented her from dancing the fifth year, she was tapped for dance captain.
The 2016 production is historic for Severo. Her four-year-old daughter will see it for the very first time. She wonders what her little girl will think of Dickens’s enduring saga about a mean-spirited old miser who musters the courage to critically examine his life and remake himself, thanks to the Ghosts of Christmas’s intervention.
The Rep’s productions are faithful to Dickens’s 173 year-old novella. At the same time, they’re fresh; every director stages the play her or his own way. One former production was like opening a “beautiful Christmas card,” Severo says; another haunted as a big, scary ghost story.
Jerry Genochio, the Rep’s producing director calls his production “fun, fast, thrilling and heartfelt.” And he says, “I love … A Christmas Carol because it reminds us that no one is beyond redemption or salvation, no matter how far they’ve fallen away from the love and care of other human beings.”
A Christmas Carol runs through Dec. 24 at Spencer Theatre on the University of Missouri-Kansas City campus. For tickets and information: kcrep.org or 816-235-2700.
