THE CHRISTMAS BRIDE  - by Noel Katz and MK Wolfe

"I'm Happiest At Christmas" - Featured in A STAGE KINDLY presents "Debut"

The Christmas Bride is a passionate love story in the Rodgers and Hammerstein tradition based on the Charles Dickens Christmas story, The Battle of Life, contrasting the bucolic Cotswolds with peril-fraught London.  It's a melodramatic odyssey of a naive farm-girl who is torn between her devotion to her family and the quite different romantic interests of three men.  Spirited young Marion becomes engaged to her father's ward but falls in love with a rakish gambler.  Rather than marry on Christmas day, she runs away with her paramour, only to be abandoned on the London docks as the police close in to arrest him.  As she struggles to make her way in the world, she learns about forgiveness and love, and discovers the true meaning of home. The Christmas Bride's New York production, at Primary Stages, was attended by Stephen Sondheim, who immediately and without solicitation sent the developing organization a substantial donation.  It was workshopped at The Actors and Directors Lab under the title, A Candle in the Window and its regional premiere took place in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Part of the fun of The Christmas Bride is the doubling of roles that allows performance by a cast of eleven.  The villain of the piece has a mild-mannered twin brother who, conveniently, is never in the same room he is.  A stuffy lawyer becomes a lascivious jailer, shop-girls become street-walkers; the script makes much sport of the characters' and the audience's difficulties in keeping identities straight.