Most fans of Randy Harrison may imagine the actor as a serious guy.

Harrison first came to the public eye in 2000 playing boyish Justin Taylor for five years in Showtime’s Queer as Folk. Since then he’s racked up some heavy duty credits including most recently as Pryor in Angels in Americaat Berkeley Rep, George in Sunday in the Park with George at the Guthrie, and as the Master of Ceremonies in the national tour of Cabaret. Closer to Connecticut, he’s been a regular during summers in at the Berkshire Theatre Festival playing in Waiting for Godot, Equus, Endgame, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, among other works.

But Harrison, 41, will tap into his wild comic side when he joins the cast in Christmas on the Rocks at TheaterWorks playing through Sunday, Dec. 23. Harrison succeeds Matthew Wilkas in the show at the downtown Hartford theater. (Wilkas will be shooting in a new sitcom series starring RuPaul)

Christmas on the Rocks is an anthology of seven very short plays with a singular premise. The plays take an iconic kid characters from a Christmas film, story, or TV show and imagines them as a troubled adults. Think Herme from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Tiny Tim from A Christmas Carol, Ralphie from A Christmas Carol, and Charlie Brown arriving in a lonely bar on Christmas Eve to share their troubles with a sympathetic bartender. Playwrights include Theresa Rebeck (Bernhardt/Hamlet), Jonathan Tolins (Buyer and Cellar), John Cariani (Almost, Maine),Jacques Lamarre (I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti), Jeffrey Hatcher (Tuesdays with Morrie), Edwin Sanchez (Clean), and Wilkas and Jenn Harris.

The theater’s producing artistic director Rob Ruggiero approached his playwright pals to be part of his alternative holiday proposal.

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