Stage Review: Saving Scrooge
“Marley was dead, to begin with….”
Stagings of “A Christmas Carol,” Charles Dickens’ ghostly tale of redemption, as ubiquitous at the holiday season as Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker” ballet, are often presented with lavish Victorian trimmings. The Grove Theater Center in Burbank has taken a different tack, focusing on the classic tale’s language — rich, thought-provoking and resonant — delivered through the deft performances of three professional actors who perform all roles.
The Equity cast features stage and screen veterans Frank Simons and David Allen Jones, and Jenna Augen (soon to reprise her 2014 UK Theatre Award-winning supporting performance in a West End production of Josh Harmon’s “Bad Jews”). Jones is the production’s Scrooge. Simons and Augen narrate and nimbly share the rest of the characters between them, using swaths of fabric alternately as mufflers, shawls, tunics and robes, the Ghost of Christmas Future’s spooky hooded garb, and the “ponderous chain” borne by Marley’s Ghost. Jones is a pitch-perfect Scrooge and Simons and Augen make their multiple characters distinctive through changes in voice and body language.
Indeed, Simons’ galvanizing growl — “Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!” — puts the audience on notice from the outset that this is no mere reading.
Contrary to many an adaptation, Dickens’ Scrooge doesn’t “bah, humbug” his way through his ghostly adventures, seeing the light only after the Ghost of Christmas Future terrorizes him with visions of his own dismal end. With the first of the three apparitions, the Ghost of Christmas Past, an increasingly humbled Scrooge is on the path to salvation, and as this production shows, his 19th-century journey still haunts and amuses, is deeply moving and is, sadly, ever alive with resonance to the present: Scrooge’s worship of profit and hapless Cratchit’s exploitation, his dismissal of the poor as undeserving of help, the Ghost of Christmas Present who decries the deeds of “…hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness” done “in our name.”
GTC Artistic Director Kevin Cochran, who wrote the adaptation and directs, points out in his program note that the script modified only 242 words of the nearly 11,000 excerpted from Dickens’ book. (A copy of the 1843 text, showing the excerpts used in the script in bold type, is available in the lobby.) These modifications involve some merging of characters, a telescoping of events, and a seamless gender change: Scrooge’s nephew is now his niece.
The shift in gender is surprisingly effective: When Augen’s vibrant, good-hearted niece busses Scrooge soundly on both cheeks in parting, despite his sputtered objections, Scrooge’s rejection of his only family member becomes all the more pitiable.
Simons plays gentle Bob Cratchit, a dizzy Ed Wynn-like Mr. Fezziwig, Marley’s Ghost, the Ghosts of Christmas Present and Future, and Joe, the unsavory rag and bone man. Besides Scrooge’s niece, Augen is careworn Mrs. Cratchit, Mrs. Fezziwig and the spirit of Christmas Past, as well as Scrooge’s sister, fiancée and Joe’s gruesome corpse-robbing cohort.
For this pocket-sized “A Christmas Carol” to work, each design element had to be spot-on, too, and that is the case here, from Cochran’s dynamic use of the small stage to Hunter Stephenson’s pristine and atmospheric sound design, David Darwin’s expressive lighting — haunting shadows, sunlight and firelight — and the starkness of Ogden’s set design: a slanted ramp that becomes Scrooge’s desk, bed and various roads and pathways faces the audience and is flanked by two low, pillared walls serving as bookstands, tables, Cratchit’s desk, seating and a lonely grave. (Ogden also conceived the deceptively simple costume design.)
Is it for children? It depends. With the production’s dearth of conventional bells and whistles, and adult themes of regret, loss and mortality, perhaps not, despite leavening humor and a final, celebratory message of forgiveness and hope. Still, before an opening weekend performance of this 80-minute, intermission-less adaptation of the Dickens’ classic, I overheard one man say to a young child he had in tow, “It’s storytelling with real people… you’re going to like it.”
Judging from the hushed quiet in the audience during the show — broken only by laughter here and there — he was right.
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LYNNE HEFFLEY writes about theater and culture for Marquee.--
Infobox
What: “A Christmas Carol”
Where: Grove Theater Center (GTC), George Izay Park, 1111-b West Olive, Burbank.
When: Friday through Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 3 p.m. Also Dec. 18, 8 p.m. Ends Dec. 20.
Tickets: $34.50 ($29.50 for Burbank residents; $24.50 for seniors and students). Pay-what-you-can Nov. 29 and 30.
More info: (800) 838-3006, www.gtc.org.