197.
A CHRISTMAS CAROL
Ebenezer
Scrooge and Jordan Belfort, the wolf of Wall Street (as per the recent movie of
that name), share one big thing in common: both are rapacious businessmen
totally dedicated to the amassing of as much money as they can, regardless of
who has to be crushed in the process. Where they differ, however, is what they
do with the money. Scrooge wants it purely for the sake of having it, as a mark
of his success, something to which he can—by looking at it glowing (via a lighting
effect) in its chest—devote the love he seems incapable of sharing with other
human beings. The idea of spending it, even in the tiniest amount, is
absolutely foreign to him; if asked by a truly destitute person for the
smallest of loans, he thinks nothing of asking for 200% interest in return,
with the money due in a week. For Belfort, on the other hand, and for many of
the Wall Street brokers he stands for, money is meant to be spent in as
flamboyantly outrageous a manner as possible. Scrooge would have a heart attack
if he could see Martin Scorcese’s movie. Regardless of what they do with their
money, though, both Scrooge and Belfort have no qualms about how they obtain
it, or who gets hurt in the process.
Scrooge,
the central character in Charles Dickens’s 1843 novella A CHRISTMAS CAROL,
continues to epitomize unchecked greed and selfishness; he’s a man who believes
the poor should die and do us all a favor. The sentimental story of his
redemption when confronted by the Ghosts of Christmases Past, Present, and
Future only grows more popular every year, with new plays and movie
adaptations; perhaps readers and audiences cannot stop hoping that the Scrooges
of this world will also come to the same conclusion. The newest version of the
story, now playing at St. Clement’s Theatre, is by Patrick Barlow, who
brilliantly adapted Hitchcock’s movie, THE
39 STEPS, into a hit play several years ago with a small cast playing multiple roles. A Christmas Carol uses only five actors,
four of them playing more than one part, with Peter Bradbury acting only
Scrooge, who’s on stage for the entire 90 minutes of the intermissionless show.
The
clever adaptation is performed within a false proscenium suggestive of a
Victorian theatre, but thrusting through the arch is a revolving stage fronted
by scalloped footlights. The music-hall look makes sense because of the overt
theatricality of Joe Calarco’s staging; the supporting cast sings familiar
Christmas carols while accompanying themselves on musical instruments, and the play,
toward the end, is revealed as just that, a play, thereby serving as a stimulus
to Scrooge to open his heart (and pocketbook) before everything fades into
memory.
Mr.
Calarco takes full advantage of Brian Prather’s scenically spare environment of
wrought-iron elements, including a window and rotating spiral staircase, with
old-fashioned gas lamps, to summon up the various 19th-century locales
required. Chris Lee’s exceptional lighting, made more potent by the fog
effect apparent as soon as you enter the theatre, is enormously helpful in
creating the appropriate atmospherics to place us in Dickensian London, as are Anne
Kennedy’s tasteful Victorian costumes and Victoria
DeIorio’s essential sound design. Combined with the use of the frequently
revolving stage, these ingredients serve up a tasty Christmas pudding of visual
and auditory pleasure.
There
are a number of telling touches for the supernatural beings, the ghost of Jacob
Marley, Scrooge’s late partner, for example, being represented by a tall actor (Mark
Light-Orr) placing a white mask on the top of his head, supplemented by a shawl
to represent hair, and bending forward so that the mask’s placement makes his
neck look that much longer. The Ghost of Christmas Past (Franca Vercelloni) is
a heavyset woman in a bowler hat, while the Ghost of Christmas Present is a
brash young woman (could she be a prostitute?), with a cockney accent, in a white, ruffled blouse, and a black
skirt over a red one, and with a Christmas ornament in her hair. The Ghost of
Christmas Future is a giant, Nosferatu-like shadow on a billowy white curtain. As
a change from traditional renditions of these scenes, in which Scrooge is
bombarded with reasons to stop being such a scrooge, this time around he
forcibly resists almost every device employed; it is only his awareness that Crachit’s
ailing son, Tiny Tim (played by a diminutive puppet), now dead, loved the same
stories (like “Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves”) he himself did as a child (before
being forbidden to read them by a nasty schoolmaster [Mark Price]) that cracks
his shell.
Mr.
Bradbury, a bit younger than conventional Scrooges, has the difficult job of
keeping us interested in a character whose bitterness and bile give him little
opportunity for variety before he achieves enlightenment, and his performance
eventually comes to seem one-dimensional. But this is A CHRISTMAS CAROL and it’s
simply in our DNA to react with tears and joy to Dickens’s
heartwarming story of a miserable old coot who calls everything warm and affectionate
“humbug” but whose own attitudes become humbug as love finds its way back into
his breast. In fact, with Scrooge suddenly giving away all his riches so that
everyone can benefit from them, he becomes at the end another kind of Jordan
Belfort, spending not on the excess but on the goodness his money can buy. “Profits
and greed?” we want to shout. “Humbug!”
