Oh yes it is: Time to enjoy Brussels' winter theatre shows in English

Winter is a busy season for English-language theatre in Brussels, with groups calling on the acting and musical talents of the international community to bring you a feast of theatre, pantomime and musical productions. Here are some of this year's performances.

BLOC
A Christmas Carol, 24-27 November

This year’s winter production from the Brussels Light Opera Company is the musical adaptation of Charles Dickens' famous A Christmas Carol. Staying true to the original story, Alan Menken’s musical version serves up the delightful story of Ebenezer Scrooge, a miserly old man who refuses to celebrate Christmas with family, friends or colleagues until the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future make him realise that if he continues to behave in such a mean-spirited manner he will end up dying alone, afraid and unloved.

Under the experienced stage direction of Diana Morton-Hooper and musical direction of Steven De Mesmaeker, 64 cast members of all ages guide spectators through the Victorian streets of London on Christmas Eve with well-known hits as A Place Called Home and Jolly Good Time. "A Christmas Carol is a ghost story but it’s also a story about redemption," says Morton-Hooper. "Scrooge has done a lot of bad things but finds good and is able to change his path he finds redemption and does well and everything ends happily ever after."

BEAT
Our Town, 24-27 November

Theatregoers may already be familiar with Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, which was written in 1937 and tells the story of the citizens of a fictional small town in New Hampshire called Grover’s Corner. Our Town is the first production of the newly created Brussels English Actors Theatre (BEAT), which was formed to mark the 10th anniversary of the Flanders Acting Studio. Acting coach John Flanders and 20 of his international students, will take to the stage to bring Thornton’s metatheatrical three-act play to life.

Flanders says he was drawn to the play by "the simplicity of the human relationships and how it reflects all of our basic human needs, the need to be loved, appreciated, sheltered, to have hope for the future and the need to appreciate our closet group of family and friends, which for a lot of us is very few, and how we need to cherish those relationships". Two of the main characters in the play are George Gibbs and Emily Webb who we first meet as children going to school, then they grow up and get married. The story of their lives is told by the stage manager, who, in a metatheatrical play, is also a main character, and he guides us through the lives of the Gibb and Webb families and the people who live in Grover’s Corner.

Contrary to Flanders' approach to acting in his regular classes, a metatheatrical play involves a lot of miming, which Flanders says "allows the audience to enter into an imaginative world, to where they fill in the details themselves, they are essentially filling in from their own experience and I think this is a very powerful thing".

ECC Brussels
Cinderella, 13-15 January

For lovers of pantomime, the English Comedy Club, under the direction of Cath Howdle, has adapted the pantomime Cinderella to comically reflect 2016’s political goings-on. This was not a difficult job for Howdle as 2016 provided her with a wealth of unbelievable events to draw from.

"Some of the biggest laughs [in a panto] are political satire, but those have to be super-relevant" says Howdle, who often finds herself writing jokes into the pantomime on the night of the show. "The joy of panto is that you end up with jokes for all the family. Sometimes those jokes are very rude, sometimes they are political, sometimes they have pop culture references - no matter what age you are in the audience you’ll always find something to laugh at."

As in all pantomimes, girls pretend to be boys and boys pretend to be girls and the cast of Cinderella do not disappoint with the ugly sisters and other characters expertly played by seasoned pantomime actors.

Green Parrot Productions
Joseph, 27-29 January

Green Parrot Productions' first show of 2017 will be Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s unforgettable Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dream Coat, with well-known hits such as Any Dream Will Do.

"Green Parrot exists to put on family musicals that will appeal to families in the audience, but also we like getting families involved in the cast and the crew," says Jennifer Landsbert-Noone, one of the producers of the show, whose son Benedict plays the lead role of Joseph.

Joseph has a cast of about 120, of whom about 50 are children. Cast member Jennifer Stoklosa, who also has two children in the play, says: "We find that doing this as a family is very rewarding and to be involved in English theatre in Brussels is fantastic. We don’t know what we would do without musical theatre here in Brussels."

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dream Coat was initially written for a school performance in 1968 and it has gone on to become one of the most popular musicals among school and amateur theatre groups. Some of the cast of this production remember performing it in school when they were young and are thrilled to get the opportunity to perform it again together with their children.

The Brussels Snowman Concert
4 December

It wouldn't be the Saint-Nicolas weekend without the annual Brussels Snowman Concert at the Auderghem Cultural Centre, raising money for Brugmann children's hospital. This is the 24th year that the Raymond Briggs classic has been performed in Brussels, under the direction of conductor Dirk Boiy, with professional musicians from La Monnaie. Mary Gow joins them on piano and the narration is given by lawyer and judge Ian Forrester.

"It's a family outing for all ages," says Gow. "We count that as unborn to the grandparents." The Snowman will be preceded this year by Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf - and there are two performances on the day, at 14.30 and 17.30.