Every year or so, contemporary entertainment-makers favor us with new, sure-to-be-surefire adaptations of Dickens’ evergreen holiday novella of 1843, A Christmas Carol. Miserly old Ebenezer Scrooge, meagre-but-upright clerk Bob Cratchit, pathetically hobbled but ever-smiling Tiny Tim, and that ghostly trifecta from Christmas Past, Present and Future all hit the boards once again, the last three garbed for Halloween Eve and inevitably egged on to liberally chew every board in the place.
Last season, for example, we had an overstuffed specimen on Broadway, from a London-based production team which set about expanding and enhancing and “improving” Dickens with indiscriminate glee, conveyers of food baskets dropped from the Lyceum’s second balcony, and varied Dickensian plotlines shoehorned in as if to suggest that the greatest English-language novelist of the 19th century needs our help to make his work palatable today. Said rendition of A Christmas Carol was entertaining, in its fashion, and altogether busy.
This holiday season—meaning from now through January 3, in this pandemic-laced year when staying home in slippers by the hearthside has a whole new meaning—we are privileged to see what might be considered the real thing. Work yourself into the mood, click on the link, and enter the world of what is called and what more rightly deserves to be called Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. We can and likely will hereafter refer to this version as Jefferson Mays’ A Christmas Carol, but what we get is the Dickens.
The up-from-the-workhouse novelist wrote his fabled tale with a specific purpose. Given his growing family and non-growing income, the 31-year-old scribe took a break from his wordy, serialized novels—this coming after Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby but before David Copperfield—to attempt something that would prove instantly commercial. The extended short story was a phenomenal success, although Dickens—who decided he’d outfox his publishers and fund it himself—didn’t amass the expected pounds sterling. By the next Christmas, England and the literate world were awash with pirated copies, with little coin flowing to the author. So much so that he was forced to pull up stakes and temporarily move his family to Genoa, where they could live on the cheap.
Dickens published three additional Christmas novellas over the next three years, which did provide significant income but more or less faded from memory while the first—officially entitled “A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas”—has remained a perennial favorite. It has also, in the ensuing 177 years, been regularly pummeled into countless versions in varied media across the globe. Scrooge McDuck, anyone?
The point of this historical tangent is that the author—who was a copyright crusader and who was seriously annoyed by the situation—eventually hit upon a method to monetize his holiday tale. There had been stage adaptations of the 1843 story as early as 1844, without the author’s participation financial or otherwise. Following the universal success of Copperfield in 1850, Dickens was such a grand public personage that he realized he could easily fill a hall with clamoring patrons eager to pay to see him sit on a platform and read from his work. Dickens read A Christmas Carol at a charity benefit in Birmingham in 1853, and thereafter did hundreds of readings of the novella up through his final illness and death in 1870. Thus, the tradition of annual appearances of the tale on the stage and eventually other media which continues to this day.
Typically, though, we get dressed-up productions that owe more to the ethos of Disney than the authentic Dickens. Jefferson Mays, that sterlingly dependable actor with I Am My Own Wife and A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder prominent among his credits, throws himself into his work so thoroughly that you can hardly recognize the person underneath. Here he takes it upon himself—he adapted the piece in collaboration with his wife Susan Lyons and his director Michael Arden—to give us Dicken’s Christmas Carol in all its finery and without added frippery.
Thus, the actor takes us through the tale—using the actual text, somewhat cut down but principally intact—over a quick 90 minutes. Basing his impersonation on a Dickens-like narrator, Mays branches through dozens of characters. (As something of an in-joke, the closing credits list a cast of 51 roles—each played by Jefferson Mays.)
Yes, this sort of thing is naturally built into a reading of a novel and even what they nowadays call an audiobook. But Mays inhabits the roles, transforming himself with quicksilver ease. We see this early on with the interchange between Scrooge and Marley’s ghost. (With the help of the lighting designer, Marley appears to be flat and black-and-white.) The Ghost of Christmas Past seems round and bright and lit from within like an electric light bulb; as the Ghost of Christmas Present attending the holiday feast, Mays seems to balloon by 20 pounds or maybe two stone. All of which transpires instantaneously while he narrates, without help from costumers or makeup artists or wigmakers.
The supreme mimicry climaxes in a 10-minute stretch wherein Mays gives us not one or two but eight members of the Cratchit family steeped in onions and sage to the eyebrows as they exclaim that there never was such a goose: Papa Bob and mama plus assorted tykes in dizzyingly and fizzyingly quick succession, sometimes three at once. Who needs a stageful of bodies and racksful of costumes when Mays can and does do it all, so entrancingly convincingly?
This production, conceived by Arden and designer Dane Laffrey (who worked with Arden on the recent Broadway revivals of Spring Awakening and Once on This Island), originated at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles in 2018. It was reassembled last month for filming, to benefit a web of regional and community theaters across the country. The production values, which seemingly originated at the Geffen, are high; while the production is mostly draped in fitting darkness numerous scenic pieces and projections as well as what appears to be a complicated turntable allow imagination to flow seamlessly. The stage sets and costume were designed by Laffrey, with highly effective lighting by Ben Stanton, sound by Joshua D. Reid, and projections by Lucy Mackinnon. Maceo Bishop serves as director of photography, and Hunter Arnold is the producer.
This presentation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol makes a special and highly theatrical holiday streaming experience. One hopes and expects, though, that it will at some point find its way back on stage where it belongs, where Mays can cast his rapt spell over a thousand souls brought together for a shared experience of live and perpetual enchantment.
Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was captured on October 28, 2020, at the United Palace in New York and is available for pay-per-view streaming through January 3, 2021. Tickets and information: achristmascarollive.com
