STATE COLLEGE — Tony M. Lentz will present his one-man performance of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” at 7 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 11, in the State Theatre Attic.
General admission is $5.
For the 39th year, Lentz presents most of the words credited with starting the modern celebration of Christmas, with voices and faces for all the characters to support audience imaginations. The two-hour story follows miser Ebenezer Scrooge and his transformation into a likeable character as he revisits critical mistakes in his past.
Lentz is a retired Penn State instructor of communications arts and sciences and former director of the Learning Edge Academic Program.
Lentz wrote that he first heard a reading of the story as a freshman at the University of North Carolina in 1965, where the annual reading was a tradition dating to the 1918 arrival of theater professor Frederick Koch on campus. Professor Earl Wynn continued the tradition in the 1960s.
“The greenhorn freshman was enchanted by visions of top hats, snowy London streets, ghoulish ghosts and hilarious Christmas parties,” Lentz wrote in a release about the show.
When he began his career in speech delivery in 1978, Lentz decided to recreate the story in Wynn’s honor at Wingate College in North Carolina. Coming to Penn State in 1980, he found a record of Dickens’ readings going back to the year of his birth in 1947, and the Daily Collegian called his reading “A Penn State Christmas Carol.”
Since that time he has performed in churches, breweries, coffee shops, libraries, rectories and schools.
“I try to convey the heart-warming message of the story so audiences have joy and hope in the Christmas season,” he wrote. “We all need to remember that life can by joyful, whatever our situation, if we choose kindness and generosity.”
Lentz wrote that he plans to perform the tale one more year. In 2017, he will turn 70, while saying “Bah! Humbug!” for the 40th season.
Contributed photo
Tony M. Lentz
