Inside A.C.T.

Meet Nicholas Pelczar, who plays Bob Cratchit in  A Christmas Carol . Nicholas Pelczar A Christmas Carol continues through December 24. Learn more about the production and order tickets . How many times have you been in A Christmas Carol ? This is my third time in Carol . I’ve played Bob Cratchit once before and when I was an M.F.A. Program student here I played Fred. What's your favorite thing about San Francisco during the holidays? This is a little hokey, but I really love the puppies in the windows at Macy’s—is there anything cuter? What is your favorite Christmas carol? It’s gotta be “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”—I sang a choral version of it in a show once and it was such a pleasure to get to that part of the show every night. What are your favorite holiday traditions? They really center around food—we celebrate our Polish heritage in my family by having pierogies and potato soup on Christmas Eve. Then we have an amazing brunch the next morning after openi...

posted by Nicholas Pelczar, A.C.T. Master of Fine Arts Program Class of 2009 Monday, the day off from the show, the theater is dark and we don’t have class. Phew. It’s a day to recover from a nine-show opening week that ended with four shows in two days. It’s also our last day off until Christmas Day. We’re about to embark on a nine-day, thirteen-show stretch that has us all secretly wondering if our bodies can hold up. It’s hard to embody the Christmas spirit so many times in so few days! Also, I don’t think any of us M.F.A. students has ever had such a concentrated stretch of shows. For the first two years in the M.F.A. Program, our projects usually got about four final performances. In our third-year Zeum shows we get about five shows a week for three weeks. So moving up to eight or nine shows a week with A Christmas Carol is quite an adjustment, and we’re all learning what it takes to keep our performances consistent and alive. Thankfully, it is a Christmas show and it’s hard ...