How Second City's Twist Your Dickens reinvents a Christmas classic

When Second City puts on a classic, you know it's going to be something different says Patrick McKenna. McKenna and Seán Cullen star in Second City's seasonal satire Twist Your Dickens written by Peter Gwinn and Bobby Mort of The Colbert Report and based on A Christmas Carol.

"The idea was to work with Pat," says Cullen who plays Scrooge to McKenna's Jacob Marley. The duo has worked together on many projects including a handful of animated series, but never in an improvised performance like this. "There's this track we follow and you just improvise within the framework," explains McKenna, "it's a different show every night." Cullen adds, "the more you work with someone, the more you can plumb the depths with them."

"In a lot of ways A Christmas Carol is done all over the place because it's still applicable in our modern day, but I think it's just the idiom they brought to it," says Cullen on reinventing the Christmas classic through current references. McKenna likens Twist Your Dickens to an episode of Family Guy with the way different narratives are woven through the performance. "It's like 'remember that time we were in a line up' and then they cut to," explains McKenna, "that's a lot of what we do."

Twist Your Dickens is now on at the Greenwin Theatre in Toronto. View showtimes here.