Library Performance On Tuesday––

A Child’s Christmas

In Wales

By Dottie Evans

“One Christmas was so much like another,” wrote poet Dylan Thomas in the opening lines of his holiday classic A Child’s Christmas In Wales.

The Welsh poet’s remembrances of growing up in a working class family during the Victorian era will be brought to life for Newtown residents by storyteller and actor Peter Loffredo of Connecticut Heritage Productions.

The live performance and reading of A Child’s Christmas In Wales will take approximately 30 minutes from beginning to end, and is scheduled for 7 pm Tuesday, December 9, at the Cyrenius Booth Library in the public meeting room. Refreshments will be served.

Mr Loffredo will be using audiotapes of Victorian era Christmas carols to enhance his performance. In phone interview Wednesday morning, he said he looks forward to Tuesday’s performance in Newtown because “every time I do this, I learn something new. I never stop discovering.”

“I’m preparing the sound tapes right now. They will be what you would have heard at the turn of the [20th] century. Hearing carols like ‘Greensleeves’ definitely sets things up for the holidays,” he added.

As Mr Loffredo reads A Child’s Christmas In Wales, he becomes the different characters by adopting their voices and accents. Dylan Thomas wrote his prose poem in two or three versions, and they were published between 1910 to 1930.

He advises his audiences to sit back and enjoy the images and the tone of the language.

“Of course, the words are English. But there is a musicality and a way of speaking that can’t be described. You have to hear it.”

As for the age of children who might attend his performance, Mr Loffredo suggested that 12 or over is usually a reliable cutoff age, “although parents are the best judge of these things.”

“Children need to be old enough to sit quietly through a live performance,” he added.