Christmas spirit haunts stage

Yes, it’s that time again — time for making lists, fighting crowds, buying presents, figuring out how to pay for them, decorating — a little or a lot — and achieving some modicum of Christmas cheer. But that’s pretty much it. Pity the hapless theatre that has to come up with something holiday-ish every December to keep the subscriber base happy. Not just come up with it — run it for a solid month and keep that cheerful smile glued on the whole time.
 
And so my Scrooge-like heart goes out to little Wayside Theatre, caught once again in the turmoil of the holidays and trying to make the best of it. Apparently answering a call to do something different with this ancient chestnut, director Warner Crocker and Steve Przybylski have teamed up to adapt the “Christmas Carol” script and add original music and lyrics. I’m going to say this just once because I’m surprising even myself: the music was the best part of it.
 
Everyone, even people who aren’t born yet, knows the story of Ebenezer Scrooge and his soul-saving ghostly encounters on Christmas Eve. Anyone who makes the effort to see this story trans-lated on the stage is likely to have a limited repertoire of reasons for doing it: 1. They’re hoping it will get them in the spirit 2. They want confirmation that no live experience can ever supplant George C. Scott 3. They want to “create memories” with their children 4. Someone’s making them.
 
There is effort and good intention, experimental ensemble work, a difficult working space, and a wide dragnet of amateur performances, but one truly fatal flaw keeps “A Christmas Carol” from its intended effect. (Dickens’ intention with ...”Carol” was to inspire and move his audience to a renewed sense of charity toward the less fortunate.) It is not possible to be inspired or moved by this production because the combined elements, with the possible exception of the songs, don’t believe it themselves.
 
Not even an 1840 English workhouse would make the same cast do this night after night, and so the Wayside cast is doubled and plays on alternate nights. This review concerns the cast of Satur-day. James Laster, a gentleman who has proven his worth in many shows, is back again to have a go at Scrooge — and has been directed, again, into the bottomless pit of attempted humor where humor doesn’t work. If Ebenezer Scrooge, acid old miser that he is, doesn’t have some dignity to go with his hard-won bitter outlook on life, all is for nothing. What difference does it make that he has a change of heart? Why should we care when we can’t identify with him to begin with? This approach merely makes him an object of remote absurdity.
 
Yes, Dickens’ name is associated with two-dimensional, primary colored characters, but he was writing for a large, simply educated public. But even with Scrooge, Dickens went to great lengths to show us the complex underpinnings that created the man. An actor should do no less.

Unfortunately, too many modern American “Cliffs Notes” versions of Dickens on the stage make all the characters flat, unbelievable and frankly ridiculous. Add to that the occasional misguided stab at an English accent and what should be a Christmas Carol becomes a Christmas goulash.
 
The examples of this are depressingly frequent. Richard Follett, who plays three characters, manages a pleasingly committed Old Joe, fencer in stolen goods. But his Jacob Marley, showing about two feet of chain and yammering about “ponderous weights” wouldn’t scare a crow off a fence. Follett’s crime, however, is Mr. Fezziwig - a man meant to illustrate generosity and simple good will now resembles a hee-hawing mental patient.
 
Everywhere, actors who I suspect know better, turn in caricatures, not characters. “Jolly” women don’t laugh, they screech like jungle birds. A gentleman soliciting donations slides unctuously over and around Scrooge. Fred (Adam Gearhart) seems bent on teasing and hounding his uncle rather than proffering a genuine Christmas invitation. For once, Scrooge’s irritability seems to make sense.
 
I don’t review children and will therefore pass on the decision to replace the Ghost of Christmas Past with a middle schooler’s performance. Sun King Davis gives a dutiful presentation of the Ghost of Christmas Present, but Christmas Yet To Come as an interpretative dancer draped in black? You think I’m making this up?
 
What is different and borders on interesting is the reality bending use of the ensemble to go from street people on the outside to Scrooge’s office furniture on the inside. There are occasional mo-ments of disconnect, for instance when Scrooge addresses them as if they were people in his house. Are they or aren’t they? Still, the concept has merit and combining voices to call him from his bed is a good idea in spite of the weakness of the ghosts that follow.
 
One matter of fact problem is the limitation of the stage space itself. The only set is dominated by Scrooge’s canopy bed and bordered by cutouts of old London buildings. Scenes that normally occur in their own settings are rewritten as spot scenes, but few of them develop any real sense of place. Nevertheless, most of the songs are refreshingly original and demonstrate a strong energy that is otherwise drooping.
 
Tamara Carruthers’ costume designs center on the grey-green-brown pallet imagined for the Victorian working classes and succeed in creating a whiff of struggle and poverty. However, two of the girls’ dresses at the Christmas dance look disconcertingly like the granny dresses of 1968, and this unfortunate lack of distinction repeats itself in Belle’s (Dacia Dick) overplayed and under-focused responses.
 
And as long as I’m being crochety — OK, I can’t help it — why on earth does Scrooge hold out an invisible glass at the Cratchit dinner? He knows there’s nothing in his hand and he certainly knows better than to toast himself.
 
There is a certain inevitability in the flurry of “Christmas Carol” showings once a year, and a certain weary need in most of us to warm ourselves at the fire of seasonal cheer, however that fire may be lit. The problem here is that this production has busied itself with the plastic, cliche-driven facade of Christmas and forgotten the substance. In its frenzy to “entertain” it has forgot-ten that the purpose of this story is “to awaken some loving and forbearing thoughts…” These are not mutually exclusive goals; perhaps cast number two does it better.
Margaret Lawrence is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association. She teaches drama and English at CCHS

WANT TO GO?
What: “A Christmas Carol: The Musical”
Where” Wayside Theatre Middletown, Va.
Call: (540) 869-1776
Playing through Dec. 28