Sometimes things that are too weird to be true actually happen, and when they do it can throw off your sense of what’s possible. So after Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, it didn’t seem out of the question that F. Murray Abraham, Timothy Hutton, James Garner, Stockard Channing, Wayne Knight, and George Wendt would all be coming to town in a touring production of A Christmas Carol, set for an eight-performance stand December 22-27 at the Civic Opera House. Or that the tickets would be selling for near-bargain rates. Or that the impresario responsible for this star-studded holiday extravaganza—adaptor, director, and producer Kevin Von Feldt—would be putting it all together from his base in tiny Rice Lake, Wisconsin, about 100 miles northeast of Saint Paul.
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Late last week, though, things were still unsettled. Although the tour was supposed to start in Philadelphia November 24, with subsequent stops in Boston, Baltimore, and Minneapolis before the Chicago run, there was no evidence that venues had been booked or tickets offered in Philly or Boston. Michael Szczepkowski, vice president and general manager of Boston’s Citi Performing Arts Center, said Monday that “discussions are ongoing, but nothing’s confirmed.”
Meanwhile, the ghosts of Von Feldt’s Christmas Carols past have started emerging from a number of reports—including a blog post by Kris Vire of Time Out Chicago—along with the rest of his colorful history.
Before that, according to the Saint Paul Pioneer Press, Von Feldt received two fines totaling $175,000 for false advertising in Ramsey County in the 1970s and 1980s. And in 1987 he got a one-year jail sentence in LA for, as the Los Angeles Times put it, “establishing an airline that didn’t fly and a movie promotion with no films.” Von Feldt advertised and sold tickets for a Hawaiian Pacific Airlines though he owned no planes and had obtained no permits, the Times reported. He also promised jobs to would-be pilots and stewards while charging them for training. While under investigation for that, he launched a multistate television ad campaign, selling a $39.95 packet of tickets to a film series featuring classics like The Wizard of Oz and The Blob, without having secured rights to the films or agreements with the theaters that would supposedly screen them. In all, LA deputy city attorney Katharine MacKenzie told the Times, he apparently bilked victims out of $300,000-$500,000. “This is the first time he’s ever gotten jail time,” she said, “and I’m hoping it will finally make him stop.”
