Friday's Internet Edition, July 25, 2008.
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Sports Editor
- Since “A Christmas Carol” is essentially the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, the Victorian-era miser and all-around curmudgeon who at last sees the error of his ways, a successful production depends greatly on an effective performance in the central role.
Fortunately for the N.C. Shakespeare Festival, Allan Edwards is more than up to the challenge; from the minute he strides on stage, imposing in black cloak, black hat and penetrating scowl, the audience knows this is no one to trifle with.
Edwards portrays Scrooge with zest and an appropriate balefulness that immediately casts a shadow on the opening scene, a joyful musical number set on the streets of London.
It’s a necessary condition of live theater that an actor – simply to ensure that the audience can hear him — must be somewhat exaggerated in words and movements as a scene unfolds; as such, Edwards’s Scrooge is a more bombastic and less quietly-grumbling version of the character than an Alastair Sim or a Patrick Stewart might have played on film.
-Far from just a bitter old man “who wishes to be left alone,” Edwards inserts into the character an active malevolence that chases away carolers and rudely rebuffs two well-meaning citizens collecting for charity. This is a Scrooge that thrives on misery, hatefulness, and spite; upon reluctantly giving Bob Cratchit Christmas Day off, Scrooge tempers this slight charity with a stern admonishment to “be here all the earlier [the] next morning” — and drives his point home by dropping Cratchit’s wages into the man’s palm, one coin at a time.
This is an assured and smartly-paced production that alternates Scrooge’s scenes with Jacob Marley (played in menacing fashion by Guies-seppe Jones) and the three spirits with ensemble musical numbers, alternately depicting the joys of the season and the grim economic realities felt by many in Victorian England.
The High Point Theatre stage is divided into three substages, on which the scenes at Marley and Scrooge, in Scrooge’s bedchamber and various locations in and around London play out; through use of movable stages and lighting effects, never is the audience confused as to what’s going on.
With carefully selected quotations from Dickens’s text (“Darkness was cheap, and Scrooge liked it”) setting the mood, Marley’s entrance in chains ups the ante a notch; suddenly Scrooge’s safe, ordered little world is thrown asunder, with the three spirits about to show – in painstaking and determined detail – just what consequences have been wrought by Scrooge’s decision to turn away from the world.
The cast is outstanding throughout; Brian Robinson turns in several scene-stealing performances as Scrooge’s nephew Fred, while Michael Tourek’s Fezziwig captures the sense of ebullient joy that Christmas can stir in the hearts of men and women – and that has been sadly absent from Scrooge’s life for far too long. Tourek and Pauline Cobrda (Mrs. Fezziwig) display admirable stage chemistry at a party thrown for young Ebenezer and the Fezziwigs’ other employees, during which the elderly Scrooge finds himself lost in the music, dancing alone among those who can neither see nor hear him — and when Mrs. Fezziwig implores her young charges to “wherever you go, remember this,” the play achieves an emotional acme.
As the play progresses Edwards effectively portrays Scrooge’s transition from a man with no apparent regrets to one just starting to realize how much has been wasted, how much he should have done differently. Scrooge’s anguished “Remove me!” after watching himself lose the sweetheart of his younger years lingers as a psychic kick to the throat; much later, when Scrooge implores The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come “Are these the shadows of the things that will be? Or are they the shadows of things that may be, only?,” his despair comes across as riveting and real.
Though several changes to Dickens’s text are less than successful — a scene in which Scrooge speaks to Tiny Tim on the street feels tacked on; an addition to Scrooge’s background, in which the young Ebenezer’s family is portrayed as never having celebrated Christmas, comes across as clumsy pop-psychoanalysis – the final scenes of the redeemed Scrooge celebrating with his fellow Londoners come as a worthy culmination to a remarkable night of magic.
It’s an old story that makes you feel young at heart, and as the play closes with Dickens’s final soliloquy (“It was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well”), all but the most cynical should leave the theatre with a firm commitment to keeping Christmas in their hearts, the whole year long.
(Dec. 6)