Christmas Past & Present: ‘Tis the Season for Dueling Dickens

Surely, you know the story.

Set in mid-19th century London, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is a morality tale about Ebenezer Scrooge’s one-night transformation from malevolent miser to charitable cherub. After revisiting the lost opportunities of Christmas past, witnessing the wasted potential of Christmas present, and foreseeing the impending horrors of Christmas yet to come, Scrooge’s spirit is rejuvenated and his relationships with his family and his underappreciated employee Bob Cratchit are repaired. God bless us, everyone.

At the Tony Award-winning Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, faithful adaptations of Dickens’ 1843 novella have been reimagined by new directors and teams of designers each year for the past 48 years and redefined by their bold color and gender-blind casting choices. Historically, the production has been staged in the intimate, in-the-round performance space of Trinity Rep’s 525-seat Chace Theater.

But this holiday season, the company’s record of successive stagings was challenged by the theater being shuttered for dramatic renovations. In response, the show has been moved to the Providence Performing Arts Center’s (PPAC) 3100 seat, proscenium arena. “Each year is different,” notes this year’s director, Tatyana-Marie Carlo, in a press release, “but the heart is always the same.”

How different is this year’s production? While Christmas isn’t a competitive sport, except for retailers and divorced parents of young children, let’s see how Trinity Rep’s present roasting of this old chestnut measures up to recent memories of A Christmas Carol past on the things that draw modern-day audiences to Dickens’ classic tale in the first place.

“Bah, Humbug!”

Ebenezer Scrooge’s soul-searching journey is pretty much the point of A Christmas Carol, so the casting of this central character is key.

Last year’s production found a marvelous Scrooge in Mauro Hantman, a veteran of 16 stagings of A Christmas Carol. Having built a career breathing life into Shakespearean heavies, including Macbeth, as well as noble men the likes of George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, his portrayal was complex. And his curmudgeonly take on Scrooge’s classic phrase was laden with layers of pathos.

Anne Scurria is one of Trinity Rep’s longest serving and most frequently performing company members. Her first show was 1979’s A Christmas Carol and, this year, she is playing Scrooge for the fourth time. It’s a disappointing performance. Rather than being greed personified, her Scrooge is cantankerous at best, as if her temperament was – like the manifestation of her dead partner Marley – merely the result of an “undigested bit of beef.” As such, the character’s 11th-hour salvation – something astoundingly hard-fought in the original text and in productions past – is a too-early, too-abrupt, and too-easily obtained occurrence, as if Dickens’ morality tale was a Disney fairytale.

A Currier & Ives Vibe

Storefront windows in downtown Providence and surrounding townships currently resemble those old Currier & Ives Christmas scene lithographs, full of wholesome sentimentality, nostalgic imagery, and snow-covered everything that magically captures the holiday spirit. Many of us look to the production values in A Christmas Carol to do the same.

It doesn’t in the Trinity Rep’s current production, where scenic designer Michael McGarty’s vision of the quaint streets of the mid-19th century consists of three tiers of charmless steel scaffolding against a black backdrop. Even with Dawn Chiang’s dramatic lighting, Amanda Downing Carney’s period costuming, and a freshly fallen silent shroud of faux snow, it still feels as if we’ve walked into a production of Newsies.

The asymmetrical layout of the Chace Theater space provided challenges, but the creative teams have always managed to find opportunities. The huge proscenium stage at PPAC and the unfortunate reality of having to build, dismantle, and rebuild the set in order to accommodate two weeks of long-booked productions in mid-December – A Christmas Carol ran from Nov 23 to Dec 4 and returns from Dec. 26 to 29 – seems to have dictated production decisions. Also impacted is the show’s timing, since actors have to cumbersomely circumnavigate the scaffolding to go from scene to scene or to simply get off the stage.

Dickens Examines Social Conscience

“Mankind was my business,” says Marley early in A Christmas Carol, in an effort to show Scrooge – and by extension, us – the error of our ways. The 1840s was a decade of extreme poverty and Dickens’ writing was, if nothing else, sensitive to this misery.

As was last year’s production, this year’s rendition is seasoned with moments that nicely tap into Dickens’ heavy-handed moralizing. One of the first is when two solicitors for the poor show up at Scrooge’s office, explain the failings of society to look after its own, and are immediately chastised and dismissed by the miser. Another is when the Ghost of Christmas Present shows Scrooge a vision of two emaciated children, bleakly named “Ignorance” and “Want,” and mocks Scrooge by quoting back to him the greedy and heartless social commentary he spewed at the solicitors.

Nora Eschenheimer, who has not been seen in past productions of A Christmas Carol, is masterful as a solicitor, the Ghost of Christmas Past, and Young Scrooge. She manages to balance poignancy with just a touch of humor, and is a pleasure to watch. For many of the actors in this production, their Dickensian dialogue comes across as overtly affected as they play to the back of the cavernous PPAC theater. Eschenheimer’s vast experience in Shakespeare’s plays makes it all sound authentically British.

Tidings of Comfort and Joy

Offsetting the play’s harrowing exploration of the depths of Scrooge’s despicable soul are scenes where comfort and joy are evoked, such as the party at Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig’s in Scrooge’s past and the get-together at Scrooge’s nephew Fred’s home in Scrooge’s present. The performance of Victorian era hymns by villagers are always go-to moments.

Past productions of A Christmas Carol tended to lean into the carol in the play’s title by serving up original music by Richard Cumming (the former composer-in-residence at Trinity Rep), an extended dance break during the party scene at Fezziwig’s, and entertaining but wholly unsolicited musical numbers with period choreography and onstage musicians in lieu of traditional hymns.

This year, the musical numbers seem bigger and bolder – as if the huge PPAC stage needed filling – which detracts from what Dickens brings to the table. The music also seems less Christmasy without the presence of woodwind instruments and the delegation of the musicians, under Garrett Taylor’s direction, to the orchestra pit. But Taavon Gamble’s choreography is nothing if not heartfelt and joyful, and the immense energy and exuberance of the stellar, all-in ensemble is contagious.

There is much about this year’s A Christmas Carol that feels more like a seasonal obligation than a Christmas tradition. Still, Dickens’ story continues to resonate and director Tatyana-Marie Carlo was absolutely correct when she suggested that no matter the differences in the annual productions, “the heart is always the same.” •

Bob Abelman is an award-winning theater critic who formerly wrote for the Austin Chronicle.

Nora Eschenheimer (center) as the Ghost of Christmas Present. Photo by Mark Turek