This Christmas Carol Tries to Put Scrooge on the Couch
Even the Muppets knew not to mess with A Christmas Carol. When their (perfect) adaptation was well past its twentieth birthday, director Brian Henson looked back on what had originally been envisioned as a “romping parody”: “Then we stopped and reconsidered,” he said. The screenwriter Jerry Juhl put it this way: “Rather than let the Muppets ride roughshod over Dickens, I went back to the novel and decided it would be rotten of us to belittle the quality of one of the greatest stories of all time.” Although the playwright Jack Thorne — in his adaptation that’s been running annually at the Old Vic since 2017 and paid a previous visit to New York in 2019 — hasn’t exactly belittled Dickens’s immortal “ghost story of Christmas,” he has assuredly made it smaller. The director Matthew Warchus swathes the production in flourishes, many of them at least partly charming: a galaxy of warm, twinkling lanterns suspended above the stage; a preshow in which the company plays carols and tosses cookies and clementines to the audience; showers of brightly lit foamy snow that will actually melt on your face. But there’s no disguising Thorne’s limp, self-satisfied script, which feels less magical than simplistically Freudian. A Christmas therapist’s couch.
Combing through an adaptation for all the ways it diverges from its source material doesn’t always feel fair — after all, why tell the same stories the same way over and over again? Regrettably, a take like Thorne’s leaves little choice, since every time he parts ways with Dickens, it’s to go down some utterly ineffectual path. This Ebenezer Scrooge (Michael Cerveris, gruff without being threatening, in a wig that’s distractingly reminiscent of Kurt Russell’s Big Trouble in Little China mullet) remains obdurate in the face of his various hauntings for so long that it starts to feel like these ghosts should be saving their moral makeover for someone else. Dickens’s Scrooge meets his final specter, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, “with a thankful heart,” hoping, by that point, “to live to be another man from what I was” — but Thorne’s stays pouty and belligerent. He parts with the Ghost of Christmas Present (Crystal Lucas-Perry, wasted in the role), railing at the heavens that he’s “a great man, do you hear me? A great man.” The moment is supposed to provide a first-act climax for a show that needs an intermission (even though its story doesn’t naturally provide one), and it comes off as overblown and bizarre. Scrooge isn’t Oedipus or Jonathan Majors. He’s got different problems.
Thorne, however, has decided those problems can all be traced back to daddy. In various shadows of the things that have been, Chris Hoch plays young Ebenezer’s father as an abusive drunk, a schemer who saddled the family with debt. No wonder his son grew up clinging to his cash. No wonder young Scrooge felt that he couldn’t marry his sweetheart, Belle (Julia Knitel, like Lucas-Perry far too good for her part, which has been laboriously appended with Strong Woman tropes) until he’d made his fortune. Here, for reasons known only to himself, Thorne has made Belle the daughter of Scrooge’s boyhood employer, the good-hearted Fezziwig (Paul Whitty), and has made Fezziwig himself (wait for it) an undertaker. “We need quick-witted souls in the funeral business,” says Belle to Ebenezer when she first meets him, and if I’d been drinking I would have done a spit take. Wait, what? Why?
No one has ever accused Charles Dickens of subtlety — his characters have names like Gradgrind, Bumble, and Cheeryble — but Thorne apparently thinks we need things double-underlined. “Fezziwig’s house at Christmas was a house unlike any other,” the ensemble informs us in its capacity as choral narrator. “Perhaps because it specialised in death, the house desired to live, and at Christmas that is what it did.” It doesn’t help that this adaptation has also jettisoned the crucial aspect of having Scrooge observe his younger selves — though there is a young Ebenezer played by Maxim Chlumecky, he’s mostly there to look cherubic in soft light, playing with a selection of childhood toys that he looks too old for. In any interaction that matters, Cerveris’s Scrooge simply steps in and plays his former self. At best, it’s awkward — why make young Belle play all her scenes with old Ebenezer? — and at worst it indicates a failure to grasp one of the story’s central lessons: The past is inaccessible; change is possible, but what’s done is done.
Across the board, Thorne’s A Christmas Carol has the feeling of having been through a bad writing workshop and taken all the feedback. One can all but hear the notes: “I don’t really relate to him. It feels like he needs more backstory”; “But like, what does Fezziwig even do? It feels like you’re missing an opportunity there”; “What if — hear me out — what if all the ghosts were kind of the same?”
Indeed, Christmases Present, Past (Nancy Opel), and a tweaked-to-conform-to-the-childhood-trauma-narrative version of Yet to Come (Ashlyn Maddox), have intentionally been homogenized — costumed identically and largely stripped of their distinctive characters. It might be Thorne’s greatest whiff of all, as it reduces the specters to a trio of scolds. Rather than confronting Scrooge with things beyond his human comprehension — immutable calm, boundless generosity, pitiless void — all three spirits simply end up castigating him. “You were alone when you died, and you needn’t have been. And you were lonely when you lived and you needn’t have been,” overexplains Maddox’s spirit, whereas her silent predecessor needed only to lift its “inexorable finger” to make itself understood. There’s no belly laughter or glorious bounty for Lucas-Perry’s Christmas Present — instead she barks at Scrooge, “Are you still unaware of the blood on your hands?” This Scrooge, you see, eventually bought and called in dear old Fezziwig’s debts, causing the death of his old employer. Because he wasn’t already bad enough.
The real question here is, who gave Jack Thorne permission? Ever since getting hired to put Harry Potter on stage, the writer seems able to do what he wants, and what he wants to do recently is make life-sucking adaptations of brilliant material. The essential shame of this A Christmas Carol is that, in attempting to make it what might generously be called more personal, Thorne has in fact rendered the story more conservative. So neatly psychologizing both the causes and the cure for Scrooge’s cruelty suggests that people can only be made to care through the narrowest of doorways. The lesson isn’t I should love my fellow humans because that’s our shared responsibility; it’s I should love them because if I don’t, I might hurt the people closest to me. Watching this poor Scrooge, I found myself thinking of an atrocious bumper sticker I once saw on a truck: “I LIKE GUNS AND MAYBE 3 PEOPLE.” It’s not that the small, mean soul has no capacity for love. It’s that it has no imagination, no way to scale that love from those “three people” to the wider world. This Christmas Carol might have cookies and choreography and real snow — and it does, in its best gesture, pass the hat for the River Fund at the end — but amidst all the shimmer and cheer, its heart remains three sizes too small.
If you want a big-hearted, community-minded, UK-developed musical pageant of social critique, you should look uptown instead, where The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions has just begun its run at the Park Avenue Armory. The title might not suggest it, but you might even consider bringing your kids. The composer Philip Venables and director Ted Huffman have adapted the 1977 queer manifesto by Larry Mitchell — with Ned Asta’s sly, sensuous illustrations à la Aubrey Beardsley — and, true to the intentionally anti-sophisticated tone of the text, they approach their story as a fairy tale. The subject is no less rangy than the history of the world. The conceit is to tell that history in simple, sincere language and winking, whimsical metaphors, from the perspective of those who “are still not free.”
Reclaiming terms like “faggots” and “fairies” and treating them with all the wonder and tenderness of a bedtime story, Mitchell’s initial intention was to write a children’s book. Ultimately, he had to found his own press to print the slim volume — which was partly based on his and Asta’s experiences living with the Lavender Hill commune — because no publisher would touch it, be it for kids or adults. Combining music and staging that are at once deceptively spare and, eventually and essentially, lush with feeling, Venables and Huffman stick close to Mitchell’s text: Their company of fifteen performers, full of virtuoso voices and musicians, guides us from an Edenic age “before the first revolutions” when “the faggots lived in gentle harmony with each other and their world” to the splintering off of “the men” from this peaceful tribe. Paranoid, isolationist, and violent, the men found the city of Ramrod, ruled over by the “most paranoid” and “most vicious” of them all, a tyrant called Warren-and-his-Fuckpole. Things go badly for the faggots and their friends, but even in the shadowy crannies of Ramrod, they find ways to survive, to dance and rebel and keep loving each other.
In a moment that encourages a miser’s grip on individual identity, it’s bracing to be jolted back to the fluidity of the ’70s, the old but somehow frequently forgotten idea that queerness is less a sexual orientation than a politics. When the performer Kit Green — radiant in a red slip dress and serving as an intermittent central narrator — speaks of “the men,” she’s not demonizing half the room based on something as dopey as anatomy. She’s talking about a mindset, a cultural poison that causes fear and competition, greed and brutality, suspicion of pleasure and worship of the efficient, feelingless machine. In one wonderful sequence, the company flings fistfuls of fluttering papers into the air as they sing about how “the men who rule Ramrod love papers”: “They love to sign them, to file them and move them around … They store them in huge underground hiding places … If a man can accumulate enough of the correct papers, he can become powerful.” The fairy tale works its spell through persistent naïveté, by simple defamiliarization that unmasks the institutionalized and the ordinary as the absurd. Money, says The Faggots, is a shared fiction we could dismantle if we wanted to. So is manhood.
The show isn’t flawless — there’s an audience participation section that feels underbaked, and I question the choice of a venue like the Armory, with its patina of wealth and its solid block of well-dressed audience members seated facing the action but well apart from it. What more might Huffman’s project have been able to convey in a sticky-floored basement full of folding chairs and old Christmas lights, with audience on all sides, able to smell the performers’ sweat? That’s the true spirit of the thing, but then you probably don’t get to deploy (as this production does) a harpsichord.
That’s fair, for in many ways Venables’s music — with its operatic heights and meditative chants, its detours from classical through bossa nova and Irish jig — is the soul of the thing, revealed in all its richness and variety by the hugely gifted ensemble. There are voices, like Mariamielle Lamagat’s and Themba Mvula’s, to stop you in your tracks; there are pieces of the eclectic orchestra that delight by their presence alone — a baritone flute, a theorbo lute, a bunch of plastic buckets played with drumsticks. Sprinting and contorting to the music, there’s the extraordinary physical performer Yandass, tearing up Theo Clinkard’s fluent choreography. (Clinkard also designed the costumes, which, like the mise-en-scène as a whole, adroitly use the casual to mask the truly elegant.) In total, there is a fitting paean to both a past and a present marked not merely by battle but by generosity and joy. Dickens wrote of the need for human to recognize human — “as fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys” — but this December, you may find that call taken up less compellingly by his own characters, and more so by the faggots and their friends.
A Christmas Carol is at the Perelman Performing Arts Center through January 4.
The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions is at the Park Avenue Armory through December 14.
Related