F. Howard Burnham is Monterey County's default English actor. Do you need an Englishman on stage? Better call Burnham. You can’t go wrong with the man who has embodied and performed as over 60 historical figures from the U.K., starting with the English-born Founding Father Thomas Payne, through Winston Churchill and Lewis Carroll, to...Her Majesty Queen Victoria.
Burnham studied modern history at the University of Durham in England, where his adventure with acting started. In 1973, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in London. After many years of work in education, he took off for America in 1998, embarking on even more adventures.
At first, Burnham lived in South Carolina. There, he started to write and perform theatrical one-man monologues of historical figures for places such as the National Park Service, South Carolina Arts Commission and, later on—as a Monterey County resident—in Pacific Repertory Theater, Monterey Peninsula College Theatre, The Bookworks and The Little House in Jewell Park in Pacific Grove.
In this appearance, Burnham will meet with the audience as a fictional persona, even though some authorities on the subject claim there was a man in Edinburgh, a caterer to the English King, on whom the character Ebenezer Scrooge was based. To most of us, he is known as a creation of Charles Dickens, in his 1843 novella A Christmas Carol. Artists have subsequently created countless movie and TV and theatrical versions of the story of a grumpy old man who finally faces his life on the night of Christmas Eve, while things turn more and more ghostly.
Join Monterey County Weekly staff writer Agata Popęda in a conversation with Ebenezer Scrooge, and be ready with your own questions for actor F. Howard Burnham, who calls Sheakspeare his god and who dragged with him quite a lot of Victorian stuff from England to the U.S. Popęda will have questions for both. Scrooge will read from the original A Christmas Carol, too.
Burnham will also be giving two live performances of Dickens performing A Christmas Carol at the Indoor Studio Theatre at Carmel's Forest Theater under the auspices of PacRep and the Monterey County Theatre Alliance at 3pm on Friday and Saturday, Dec. 22 and 23.