The busyness of the holiday season is here. Of the several holiday parties I’ve attended this month, my favorite was a festive reunion of the National Critics Institute. Arts journalists who participated in the two-week training boot camp at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center over the years gathered in Manhattan to reconnect and celebrate Chris Jones’s 10th anniversary of leading the program. It was wonderful to meet fellow writers and learn about where the training had taken them, from theatre reporting to food criticism to radio journalism.

Speaking of training, I had the opportunity to talk with Kenneth Martin, the head of the theatre department at the University of Tennessee, where students are currently performing A Christmas Carol with the Clarence Brown Theatre. The school’s partnership with the Lort D theatre offers students a unique, firsthand experience of putting on a show. There are 38 undergraduates involved, both onstage and behind the scenes, from performing in ensemble roles to working as production assistants alongside professional actors and an equity stage management team.

“The students get this incredible opportunity to work with all of these pros to do a four-week run of a show where, I think we’ll seat 9,000 people this year,” says Martin. The run will include five sold-out student productions for local elementary school students. For these youth shows, a graduate student will perform the role of Scrooge.

Even more than the hands-on experience of working on a show is the chance to be part of a beloved, decades-long tradition in the community. “It’s just a wonderful evening at the theatre, and our students see it, you know? They certainly feel it from the audience as our audience sings ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’ at the end while the snow is flying over them in the audience. It’s been a blast,” says Martin.