Christmas shows coming to Hoover Library Theatre

The Hoover Public Library has two Christmas shows coming to the Library Theatre in December.

The Red Mountain Theatre Company on Dec. 5-6 is putting on a play called “Holiday Memories,” and children’s entertainer Roger Day will perform Christmas-themed shows on Dec. 12-13.

“Holiday Memories,” inspired by Truman Capote’s experiences growing up in Alabama during the Depression, follows the adventures of a young boy during the holiday season.

It covers two stages of his life, the 7-year-old Buddy and the middle-aged Truman, and shares about Southern traditions, the relationships of family and the importance of shared humanity.

The show is being produced in honor of Jack Mann, a mainstay in the Birmingham theater community who died at the end of 2018. Red Mountain Theatre Company Executive Director Keith Cromwell will direct in collaboration with Mann’s son, Philip Mann, and the Alabama Center for the Arts.

Mann’s wife, Suzanne Mann, will play the role of Sook Falk, one of Capote’s cousins. Bryant Whitney will play the young Truman, while Kyle Holman will portray the novelist, screenwriter, playwright and actor as an adult. Other actors participating are Nick Crawford and Jessica Clark Boody.

The show should last about an hour, said Jamie Schor, marketing manager for the Red Mountain Theatre Company.

Day, a children’s musician, is scheduled to perform a show that will feature some Christmas classics and likely some of his silly original non-holiday-related songs that have become a hit with children across the country, said Jeremy Davis, the head of the children’s department at the Hoover Public Library.

His two concerts, called “It’s a Roger Day Holiday,” are taking the place of the children’s Christmas-themed theatrical productions that have been put on at the library the past four years, Davis said.

Day has performed at the Hoover Public Library every summer for the past 10 years. He grew up in Gardendale but now lives in Franklin, Tennessee. Day is a five-time winner of the Parents’ Choice Award and plays more than 100 shows each year at places such as the Children’s Theatre of Charlotte to the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, New York.

The Target Children’s Book Festival has invited him to play festivals in Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston, and the International Children’s Festival in Edmonton, Alberta, brought him to Canada, according to his website.