A Christmas Carol

Just started prepwork for our annual holiday show:  a reader's theater production of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.  For mainstream America, it's a pretty well known title and just about everyone has seen at least one version (if not more!) of it.  There are a lot of amazing interpretations out there (I think my favorites would be A Muppet Christmas Carol and Scrooged, starring Bill Murray) and all of them are fun in one way or another.  There are also, as it turns out, many stage versions as well.  But here's the thing about all of them:  They follow the story line and hit all the high points, but you really don't get to experience the full impact of Charles Dickens' remarkable and moving prose.  The reason for that is that all the descriptive narrative in the Dickens text is turned into visual production value. Consider the following text:

 "Meanwhile the fog and darkness thickened so, that people ran about with flaring links, proffering their services to go before horses in carriages, and conduct them on their way. The ancient tower of a church, whose gruff old bell was always peeping slily down at Scrooge out of a Gothic window in the wall, became invisible, and struck the hours and quarters in the clouds, with tremulous vibrations afterwards as if its teeth were chattering in its frozen head up there. The cold became intense. In the main street, at the corner of the court, some labourers were repairing the gas-pipes, and had lighted a great fire in a brazier, round which a party of ragged men and boys were gathered: warming their hands and winking their eyes before the blaze in rapture. The water-plug being left in solitude, its overflowings sullenly congealed, and turned to misanthropic ice. The brightness of the shops where holly sprigs and berries crackled in the lamp heat of the windows, made pale faces ruddy as they passed."  (Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, (c)1905 The Baker and Taylor Company)

It paints a picture for you, right?  That is Dickens' prose.  But instead of experiencing those words the artistic minds responsible for the movies and plays interpret that into a visual representation. So you see cold people warming their hands and you see frozen water, and you see shop windows decorated with holly and berries.  You probably even see people peering in the shop windows and the light being reflected off their faces.  And that's great; it's made for some stellar movies.  But you lose something in the translation from page to screen.  You lose the words. You lose the chance for your immeasurably and endlessly creative brain to paint its own picture.  The written word, like the spoken word, has a special and powerful magic all its own.  And Dickens' was a master of that magic.  That is why we have chosen to take the text of his original 1842 novella and adapt it into a reader's theater.  Instead of paring the story down into its dialogue and doing a stage version that presents the rest as a visual statement, we have left the narration in and formatted the show to have a staged dialogue section and a narration section.  So the structure of our show is that we have a contemporary clothed narrator sitting in a wing chair "reading" the story to the audience and then when we reach action or dialogue moments, the focus switches over the Victorian costumed stage actors who then perform the dialogue intereactively.  It's fun.  It has strong visual production value.  And you get the rare privilege of experiencing most of the original text.

AND as icing on the cake? Well, all the reader's theaters at Hamilton Playhouse are free to the public.  We offset the costs of the shows (costuming, props, tech, licensing, etc) by hosting a bake sale fundraiser at each event.  The holiday bake sale that accompanies A Christmas Carol is epic.  There are tons of delicious goodies that you can enjoy as a concessions treat or take home in bulk as holiday treats to be shared with friends and family.  So mark you calendars and get ready to experience A Christmas Carol in a whole new way!  Friday, December 22 at 7pm.  (doors open at 
6 pm; seating begins at 6:30 pm). See you at the Playhouse!