Rep’s ‘Christmas Carol’ : Scrooge, Tiny Tim and the Crew Emerge With Issues Untouched

One hardy bloom turns up every year at this time in almost every city in the land. Audiences not only never seem to mind “A Christmas Carol,” they also all but demand the Charles Dickens classic as an annual rite.

Year after year, people still want to see how stingy old Scrooge learned to keep Christmas in his heart.

The San Diego Repertory Theatre is now in its 13th year of dishing up Doug Jacobs’ adaptation, which plays at the Lyceum Stage through Dec. 24. What keeps the Charles Dickens classic fresh from year to year are the different riffs directors play on the timeless tale.

Some use the quaintness of its nearly century-and-a-half old London setting for a fairy tale effect. Others, like Sabin Epstein two years ago, play up the poverty that stands in contrast to Ebenezer’s greed.

Still others focus on the issue of self-knowledge and how Ebenezer is transformed by the journeys he takes with the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future through his own past, present and future.

And then, too, there is Dickens as social critic, always repeating the lesson that no man is an island; that, if Ebenezer Scrooge continues to be tight with his clerk, his clerk’s son, the crippled Tiny Tim, will die for want of the care he needs.

Everyone has druthers, of course. It might seem that with the growing problem of homelessness in San Diego, a reminder of the inter-relatedness of the world would be timely. Certainly, Dickens, whose impoverished boyhood found him working while his family lay in the Marshalsea Debtor’s Prison, might see it that way.

Director Michael Addison has gone the fairy tale route and done a charming job with an appealing cast. No need to fret about tough, insoluble issues here: Scrooge’s crabbed heart starts loosening within five minutes of visiting his past; the clerk’s family is quite handsomely dressed for a family just this side of pauperdom, and Tiny Tim is a healthy-looking lad with a slight limp. We never believe for an instant that he’s going to die.

Actually, the hardest-hitting aspect of this vision is that no intermission divides the two-hour show.

The actors deliver winningly good-natured performances within such limited parameters. Tom Oleniacz brings delicious comic timing to old Scrooge’s “humbugs” and “harrumphs”--first when he means them, and later, when he’s teasing.

Darla Cash is cleverly cast, both as narrator and as the woman Scrooge almost married before her lack of dowry became an issue. It deepens her concern as the narrator and, in the end, when she beams as he turns his life around, one feels rapprochement over his lost love having at last been found.

Larry Paulsen sounds the darkest notes as the tormented ghost of Scrooge’s old partner, Jacob Marley, come to warn Scrooge of the fate that will befall Ebenezer if he doesn’t mend his ways. Paulsen’s voice, hissing out from beneath fixed, deadened eyes, comes like a messenger from a darker “Christmas Carol Past.”

Like Paulsen’s performance, Gina Leishman’s musical score offers more depth than the production calls for. Leishman’s flow from early Kurt Weill-like discordance to 19th-century English harmonies tells its own independent story of a tortured soul’s journey to ultimate peace.

Unlike Ron Ranson’s thin, sketch-like set and Nancy Jo Smith’s pretty costumes, the very texture of the music belies the transformation of the violent “Oliver Twist” into the sunshiny musical “Oliver!”

Ah, well. Just as children found “Oliver!” more digestible than the harsh indictment of poverty in the novel that inspired it, they will probably cotton to this “A Christmas Carol,” right down to the characters coming right into the audience and shaking hands.

If they can get past being scared by Jacob Marley, this show is G-rated all the way.

“A CHRISTMAS CAROL”

By Charles Dickens. Adapted by Douglas Jacobs. Directed by Michael Addison. Music written and arranged by Gina Leishman. Set by Ron Ranson. Lighting by Craig Wolf. Costumes by Nancy Jo Smith. Sound by Debby Van Poucke. Choreography by Roxanne M. Captor. Vocal director is Linda Vickerman. Stage manager is Elizabeth Lohr. With Priscilla Allen, Bernard Baldan, Damon Bryant, Darla Cash, Roger Chapman, Kate Frank, Luther Hanson, Paul James Kruse, Todd Neal, Tom Oleniacz, Larry Paulsen, Jo Ann Reeves, Mysti Stanton, Kyle Wares and Heidi Wilson. At 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays with Saturday-Sunday matinees at 2 through Dec. 24. At 79 Horton Place, San Diego.