A Christmas Without Snow

Zoe Jensen, a recently divorced woman with an unhappy past moves to San Francisco to begin again. Zoe is broke and heart-sick for the young son she left in her mother's care in Nebraska. Reentering the job market as a middle-aged woman, Zoe finds that she is over-educated but under-experienced for most desirable positions. Resigned to life as temp, Zoe finds hope and a surrogate family at her local church's choir. The new choirmaster Ephraim Adams (John Houseman) is shaking up the woebegone choir by demanding results of the undisciplined singers. Aided by the parish priest Reverend Lohman (James Cromwell) and Jewish music director (Ed Bogas), Ephraim and Zoe rediscover their faith and come to appreciate a yuletide season, which is full of hardship as well as love.

Directed by John Korty, famous for the sensational 1973 TV movie classic, "Go Ask Alice" and the adroit film of Lanford Wilson's play Redwood Curtain (1995), A Christmas Without Snow bucks melodrama in favor of nuanced character study which packs a forceful emotional wallop. Featuring a gifted ensemble of actors lead by the incomparable John Houseman, A Christmas Without Snow is a poetic slice of life that is rich in wisdom.

A newly divorced and jobless woman in a strange city far from home joins a church choir and under the direction of a stern but gifted choir master, she becomes part of a group striving toward a common goal: to shape a ragtag assembly of amateurs into a chorus capable of performing Handel's "Messiah" for the Christmas service.