For centennial finale, St. Pete City Theatre recreates its own 1940s ‘Christmas Carol’ WSUN broadcast

For the finale of its 100th anniversary season, St. Petersburg City Theatre—one of the oldest continuously operating community theaters in Florida—is dipping back into its past. 

On Dec. 22,1940, the company performed “A Christmas Carol” on WSUN, the radio station that was situated on what is now the St. Pete Pier. For the 2025 production, Board President Stefanie Lehmann wrote an adaptation that re-creates that radio broadcast for the stage. 

Radio adaptations of holiday favorites have become a staple of late. TampaRep staged an excellent “It’s A Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play” in 2024, and the company hopes to make magic at the mics again this year with Jim Sorensen’s adaptation of “A Christmas Carol” which, like SPCT’s, will be set in a radio station in the 1940s.

At both Tampa Repertory Theatre and SPCT, the radio actors will step up to the mics to play the Dickens characters, and there’ll be live sound effects and faux ads with made-up jingles. But where the six-member cast at TampaRep will play what Sorensen calls “exaggerated versions of themselves,” the 16 actors at SPCT (full disclosure: I’m one of them) are portraying people who were part of the troupe at the time of that WSUN broadcast 85 years ago. 

“The ‘40s sections are all based on real people,” Lehmann told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay, “and in most cases on real stories or quotes that I found in our archives.”

Lehmann’s mother, long-time SPCT board member Stacie Lehmann, organized the theater’s massive repository of newspaper articles and documents during the pandemic. When Stefanie looked through them, she stumbled upon items related to the 1940 “Christmas Carol” radio show performance.

“Particularly during the war years, a lot happened very quickly at our theater between 1940-1943,” said Lehmann, “but I needed to fold events from across those months into a single Christmas Eve broadcast. I landed on December 1942 because it seemed to be the collision point of a lot of these inspiring stories.”

At the top of the 1942 show as imagined in Lehmann’s script, company members carry on props for the sound man, look over their scripts, and trade news about the war. I play Captain Patrick Walters, a British expatriate who’s directing the broadcast. I learned from Lehmann’s research that Walters was a Royal Marines veteran who moved to Florida in the ‘30s, where he was hired to lead what was then called the St. Petersburg Little Theater. (The theater changed its name from “Little” to “City” in 2010.)

Several cast members augmented Lehmann’s findings with their own. 

Local theater favorite Velda Gauthier discovered that Cafe Clementine at the Museum of Fine Arts was named after her character, Clementine Japour, who co-owned a popular boutique on Beach Drive and served as the Little Theater’s president at one time. Clem’s turns at the mic include the role of a saucy charwoman.

Erin Kennedy plays Japour’s sister, Beth McNeely, who was co-owner of the boutique and, says Kennedy, “a local fashion icon.” The script has McNeely arrive for “Christmas Carol” decked out in full Dickensian garb—even though it’s a radio show. Kennedy, who did the costumes for “Sister Act” earlier this year, says, “It is most fitting that my debut line on this stage is ‘Theater begins in the cloakroom!’”

Her two sons—Clark, 10, and Clifton, 9—are also in the cast, and appeared in SPCT’s 2023 adaptation of “Carol.” (The theater has done at least 12 in-person adaptations of the Dickens story over its 100 years.)

Bill DeYoung, arts reporter for the St. Pete Catalyst, plays Frank Joyner, the company member assigned to play Scrooge.  Joyner’s wife, Frances, played by Laura Banks, suggests that Walters typecast him as the “squeezing, grasping” miser, but by all accounts Frank was generous in his support of the Little Theater both on and offstage, as was she. DeYoung came to “Carol” equipped with experience as an actor in local theater and a repertory company in Savannah, Georgia. He also brought his own well of background knowledge about SPCT; he played the Ghost of Christmas Present in 2017 and wrote a comprehensive history of the theater for the Catalyst in 2021.

As is often true with community theaters in which everyone involved is a volunteer, there’s a “come one, come all” vibe at SPCT, an ethos which has guided the Little Theater movement since its inception in the 1920s. Accordingly, there’s a wide variety of experience, theatrical and otherwise, in the cast and crew of “Carol.” 

Banks, who moved to Gulfport from New York City only about a year ago, has done improv with Whoopi Goldberg in L.A., performed a one-woman Off-Broadway show, and appeared in  “Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan.” 

Don Speirs, a retired military veteran, plays WSUN program director George Bartlett, who voices Bob Cratchit and old Fezziwig. He learned from an online biography that Bartlett wrote for the St. Petersburg Times for several years; another cast member unearthed the info that Bartlett was also an accomplished painter and a professional banjo player. This is only Speirs’ second appearance with SPCT, but he’s been acting for five decades, from touring in musicals to a three-year stint as the Seattle Seahawks’ Santa Claus.

Richard Isaacs, a young IT retiree, plays Tom Howell, a Seabee on medical leave who takes the role of Young Scrooge; a Louisville native, he’s been involved in community theater for 30 years, and has done two previous shows with SPCT. Mike Nower, the director, is a retired CFO; he and his wife, Sara, spend half the year in Gulfport and half in the UK, where they both are active in community theater. He played Scrooge in SPCT’s 2016 “Carol,” but this production will be his first time directing for the theater’s mainstage. His wife, Sara, plays a WSUN employee and the narrator of “Carol”; she’s been seen in starring roles at The Off-Central. (Both try valiantly to correct our not-always spot-on English accents.)

Some in the cast, like Banks, Kennedy and myself, are first-timers on the SPCT stage. That’s the case, too, with Samantha Lee, a veterinary technician who’s playing company member Betty Voorhees and the Ghost of Christmas Past. Others are long-time denizens. Stan Gurvitz, a self-described “handyman on the cusp of retirement,” plays company member Howard Weston and grizzled Old Joe and has been doing shows at SPCT for 10 years, including five productions of “Christmas Carol.” Stage manager Donna McCall-Thibodeau, a customer retention agent for USPS, has the record in our group, it seems; she’s been doing shows at SPCT since 1986.

Many of the company members remark on the family feeling at the theater.

Lehmann, 34, is a case in point. The associate general manager for performance and campus operations at NYC’s Lincoln Center, she started working remotely from Florida during COVID and has continued to do so ever since. She and her mother were among the many SPCT members who banded together to ensure the theater’s survival through a series of recent crises: a financial shortfall in 2017, the pandemic in 2020, and last year’s two devastating hurricanes, one of which blew the theater’s new roof off just after it had been installed. 

The Little Theater was fraught with cares in 1942, too. Wartime pressures loom in Lehmann’s script. Gas rationing is on the horizon, threatening to reduce audience attendance just as the company is about to move into a new building. As we learn later in the broadcast, at least one company member has lost his life on the battlefield.

But, as Captain Walters states, “Our little theater is nothing if not resilient.”

True then, and true now. 

“This Christmas Eve 1942 felt like a moment where the community could come together and take a moment to stop and breathe together, to reflect on the past years’ victories and losses, and to reaffirm their values and purpose as they look toward the future,” said Lehmann. “As we enter this next century, I hope we do much the same.”

If you go see ‘A Christmas Carol’ at St. Petersburg City Theatre

Tickets for “A Christmas Carol” showing select nights Dec. 12-21 at St. Petersburg City Theatre are still available for $10-$23.

UPDATED 12/08/25 12:58 p.m. Updated to make clear that Mike Nower, the director, is a retired CFO.

This article appears in Nov. 27 – Dec. 03, 2025.