Review: THE SECOND CITY'S TWIST YOUR DICKENS at The Kennedy Center

Riddled with anachronisms and enough irreverent potshots to keep your naughty inner child sated through the New Year, The Second City's Twist Your Dickens is just the ticket for a crowd of world-weary Washingtonians.

Written by former Colbert Report writers Peter Gwinn and Bobby Mort, Twist Your Dickens stars second City alums Carisa Barreca and Paul Jurewicz and DC local Eric M. Messner alongside returning cast members Aaron Bliden, Anne Bowles, John Lescault, and Tia Shearer. The entire cast is stellar, masterfully slipping in and out of a multitude of crazy characters so rapidly my head is still spinning.

An irreverent Christmas satire, Twist Your Dickens uses audience interaction and improvisation to scandalize and engage its audience. This performance weaves the audience's misdeeds into the fabric of the performance. So if you've ever photoshopped your sister's eyebrows out of all of her photos, take your self down to Twist Your Dickens and you (yes, you!) could be an integral part of a professional theatre production.

Charles Dicken's classic A Christmas Carol is the beating heart of Twist Your Dickens. Scrooge (Lescault) verbally abuses a Bluetooth-wearing Cratchet (Bliden). Later, he is visited from the ghost of Jacob Marley (Mossner). Did you know that Scrooge and Marley do the same best friends handshake that my best friend and I used in 3rd grade!

Scrooge visits his lost love Belle and explores a typical Christmas morning in the 1960s and the 1990s with the Ghost of Christmas Past (Jurewicz, a masterful improviser), a glam rocker from the 1980s. Fans of nostalgia and neon will surely get a kick out of Twist Your Dickens.

The Ghost of Christmas Present (Barreca) may be barefoot, slightly drunk from the night before, and glued to her phone, but she somehow manages to transport Scrooge to the Cratchits' kitchen. There he watches Mrs. Cratchit (Bowles) and Tiny Tim (Shearer) plot his death by "suicide."

Spoof vignettes are sprinkled throughout Twist Your Dickens. Scrooge's boardroom of over-caffeinated Grinches and the hipsters discussing food trucks elicited voluble laughter from the audience. The observational humor at the heart of scenes like these is highly relatable.

The only downer is the rather lazy political one-liners sprinkled throughout the performance.

Director Frank Caeti (the original Ghost of Christmas Past) makes great use of every inch of Theater Lab's relatively small stage, transforming seven cast members into a bustling Victorian street one moment and choreographing a Santa striptease in the aisles the next.

The production team includes Sound Designer Reid May and Costume Designer Ivania Stack. Lightning Designer Brittany Shemuga's design is lively and colorful.

All in all, Twist Your Dickens is a jolly, lighthearted way to celebrate the Christmas Season. Even Scrooge agrees!

THE SECOND CITY'S TWIST YOUR DICKENS runs through December 31, 2017 at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Theater Lab at 2700 F St. NW, Washington, DC 20566. For tickets call (202) 467-4600 or click here.

Running Time: Approximately 2 hours, including one 15-minute intermission

Advisory: Strobe lights and profanity, recommended for ages 16+

Photo Credit: Anne Bowles, Paul Jurewicz, and Tia Shearer in Twist Your Dickens._Photo by Teresa Castracane.

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