Ten-year-old Tayan Cooper, plays Ralphie Parker in Charleston Light Opera Guild’s production of “A Christmas Story the Musical.” The show which opens Frida7 at the Culture Center Theater in Charleston is a musical adaptation of popular holiday film about a boy and his Christmastime quest for a Red Ryder BB gun.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Part of what makes the movie “A Christmas Story” so appealing is that 9-year-old Ralphie Parker is a stand-in for anyone who ever wanted something they couldn’t have during the gift giving holidays.
Just about all of us.
The thing that Ralphie wants more than anything else is an “Official Red Ryder, Carbine Action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle,” and nobody, absolutely nobody, seems to want him to have it.
“You’ll shoot your eye out,” is the popular refrain.
Tayan Cooper, the 10-year-old Piedmont fifth-grader who plays Ralphie, in Charleston Light Opera Guild’s production of “A Christmas Story: The Musical,” which opens Friday at the Culture Center Theater, also has a very specific gift he’d like to find Christmas morning.
A video game fan, Cooper wants a copy of “Grand Theft Auto V.”
His parents have said, “No.”
And not without good reason…