A Christmas Carol
Written by Charles Dickens
Adapted by Tom Creamer
Directed by Steve Scott
Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn (map)
thru Dec 31 | tickets: $25-$92 | more info
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A newly minted Christmas classic
Goodman Theatre presents
A Christmas Carol
Review by Lawrence Bommer
34 years relevant, this year’s edition of Goodman Theatre’s “cash cow” – a reverent revival of the classic 85-page Christmas gift to the world – resonates more than before. When Charles Dickens forces a miserable miser to face the apparitions of Want and Ignorance beneath the folds of the Ghost of Christmas Present, he meant to warn his readers about political and food riots that had recently convulsed London. (Sounds familiar?)
A Christmas Carol, Dickens’ 1843 parable, is a cautionary lesson for any era’s 1% to remember that we are all “fellow passengers to the grave,” that the answer to poverty is not just prisons and workhouses, and, above all, that Bob Cratchit’s salary is not to be determined by “just what the market can bear” but by a fair as well as living wage that makes workers into consumers and brings prosperity to all.
Without altering Tom Creamer’s serviceable adaptation (which in any case pays welcome attention to the particulars of want and ignorance), Steve Scott’s staging of this surefire success resonates with the anger of “Occupy Wall Street.” Of course, a literary work as imperishable and universal as “A Christmas Carol” alters with the future and always fits the facts, facts that feel never less persuasive than today. The Currier and Ives nostalgia matters very little in this blast from the past. What’s past is prologue, as another great writer glimpsed even earlier.
As always, Ebenezer, who must never for one second behave as if he knows he’ll be “saved,” endures a crash course from four ghosts in therapeutic guilt, followed by the redemptive hope of a second chance. The spirits deliver this misanthropic “loan shark” enough “near life experiences” to allow him to rejoin the real world in real time—and on Christmas Day no less! Time to purchase the turkey that’s twice the size of Tiny Tim!
Ron Rains is efficiently affecting as the pure and patient Cratchit, Karen Janes Woditsch maternal and supportive as his helpmate. Nathan Hosner makes the fiercest Marley yet–which is fine since Scrooge’s early scenes must be scary rather than sitcom, as the condescending chucklers in the audience would prefer it. Ross Lehman and Ora Jones have the usual patented jollity as the festive Fezziwigs, the emotional opposites to the future Ebenezer, while Nora Fiffer is affecting as the one chance at love that Ebenezer substituted for the counting room.
So now the non-Ebenezer 99% (who Scrooge calls the “surplus population”) have their official Christmas gift from a prescient writer who died 141 years ago. Maybe those contemporary Grinches who want to enlarge the prisons and turn our schools into workhouses so the misers of America can pay no taxes whatsoever will see the stupidity of their short-sighted selfishness. But, alas, judging from the evergreen importance of A Christmas Carol, the lesson clearly needs repeating: The 35th season beckons in 2012!
Rating: ★★★★
A Christmas Carol continues through December 31st at the Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn(map), with performance 9 times per week (holiday schedule here). Tickets are $25-$92, and are available by phone (312-443-3800) or online (check for half-price tickets at Goldstar.com). More information at GoodmanTheatre.org. (Running time: play length, which includes one intermission)
All photos by Dean LaPrairie and Eric Y. Exit
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