About the Play:

Winner of the 2002 Jessies, Sydney Risk Award for outstanding new play by an emerging playwright.

Cariboo Magi is a full-length comedy by Lucia Frangione. In B.C. in 1870, four would-be actors – a drunk and discouraged ex-Anglican minister, a sassy French saloon owner with a mysterious past, a disgraced child star, and a Canadian miner with the soul of a poet – tramp through the deep snow in order to fulfill a desperately needed performance contract to perform a Christmas pageant, only to discover they've rehearsed the wrong play. Cariboo Magi is an unabashed celebration of the power of theatre to renew our lives and banish our cares.

Cariboo Magi is a delightfully loopy Christmas story in which St. Luke meets Shakespeare, Dickens, and dancing girls, with shades of Last of the Mohicans thrown in for good measure. How do we find ourselves again when the landmarks of our identity have been lost? At the tail end of the California Gold Rush, Fanny DuBeau, an avaricious saloon keeper with a murder in her past, is drowning in bills and facing foreclosure on her saloon. She intercepts a theatre contract meant for a San Diego theatre company The Pageant Players, offering a tidy sum to perform a Christmas play for the Theatre Royal in Barkerville, British Columbia. She immediately recruits three other lost souls to impersonate the theatre troupe and claim their profits: William Teller, a defrocked Anglican minister who has traded his gold cross for drink, Marta Reddy, a pregnant child star who has become too old for her roles, and Joe Mackey, a Canadian miner who claims to be the last of the Mohicans. Together, they journey up through the wilds of the Cariboo gold rush, rehearsing a dizzying pastiche of of Hamlet, The Last of the Mohicans, A Christmas Carol and The Gospel of Luke, braving wolves, weather and frostbite, and somehow finding themselves along the way.

Cariboo Magi premiered in 2001 at Pacific Theatre in Vancouver and played to turn-away crowds and critical praise winning Lucia Frangione the Jessie Award (Vancouver's equivalent of Toronto's Dora Mavor Moore theatre award) for outstanding new script by an emerging playwright. Since then it has been consistently delighting audiences, and has become a staple of regional repertory houses and community theatres.

Cast: 2 female, 2 male

What people say:

"A beautifully written tribute to the strength of the human spirit." — Vancouver Sun

"Devilish wit, deep religion, sheer audacity… I cried. I laughed. And I thought. Who could ask for more?" — The Georgia Straight

"Cariboo Magi is such an original, refreshing take on the Christmas story that even the Scroogiest theatregoer would have trouble resisting its charms." — The Georgia Straight

About the Playwright:

Lucia Frangione is an internationally produced award winning Canadian playwright and actor, best known for performing in her own works. The author of over twenty-five plays, she received training through Studio 58 and Rosebud School of the Arts.