A Christmas Carol - American Conservatory Theater

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WORDS on PLAYS
INSIGHT INTO THE PLAY, THE PLAYWRIGHT, AND THE PRODUCTION
2005/2010
AMERICAN CONSERVATORY THEATER
A Christmas Carol
by charles dickens
adapted by carey perloff and paul
walsh
music by karl lundeberg
directed by domenique lozano
based on the original direction by
carey perloff
choreography by val caniparoli
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A M E R I C A N C O N S E R V AT O R Y T H E AT E R
Carey Perloff, Artistic Director
Ellen Richard, Executive Director
PRESENTS
WORDS on PLAYS
INSIGHT INTO THE PLAY, THE PLAYWRIGHT, AND THE PRODUCTION
A Christmas Carol
by charles dickens
adapted by carey perloff and
paul walsh
music by karl lundeberg
directed by domenique lozano
based on the original direction
by carey perloff
choreography by val caniparoli
music direction by robert rutt
scenery by john arnone
costumes by beaver bauer
lighting by nancy schertler
sound by jake rodriguez
WORDS ON PLAYS
prepared by
elizabeth brodersen
publications editor
jessica werner
contributing editor
margot melcon
publications & literary assistant
© 2005, 2010 AMERICAN CONSERVATORY THEATER, A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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words on plays is made possible by
Special thanks to JPMorgan Chase Foundation, The Kimball Foundation,
The Michelson Foundation, and Union Bank Foundation
for their support in bringing arts education programs to our community.
Costume sketches © 2005 by D. B. Bauer.
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table of contents
1.
Characters and Synopsis of A Christmas Carol
6.
A Brief Biography of Charles Dickens
by David Elliott
8.
Dreaming a New Carol
by Elizabeth Brodersen
14. Interviews with Members of the Creative Team for A Christmas Carol:
Carey Perloff, Director/Coadaptor * Paul Walsh, Coadaptor
Karl Lundeberg, Composer * John Arnone, Scenic Designer
Beaver Bauer, Costume Designer * Val Caniparoli, Choreographer
37. A Carol Philosophy
by Paul Walsh
41. A Man Redeemed by Memories
by Michael Paller
45. An Excerpt from A Christmas Carol
By Charles Dickens
47. Some Noteworthy Versions of A Christmas Carol
49. Questions to Consider
50. For Further Information . . .
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characters and synopsis ofA CHRISTMAS CAROL
A Christmas Carol, adapted from Charles Dickens’s 1843 novella by Carey Perloff and
Paul Walsh, premiered at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, California,
on November 26, 2005.
characters
ebenezer scrooge
ghost of jacob marley
bob cratchit
anne cratchit
sally cratchit
peter cratchit
tiny tim cratchit
belinda cratchit
ned cratchit
martha cratchit
clerks
charitables
businessmen
fred
mrs. dilber
woman in street
ghost of christmas past
schoolmaster
davey
edward
boy dick
boy scrooge
little fan
woman in the street
beggar girl
mr. fezziwig
mrs. fezziwig
young scrooge
dick wilkins
belle
ermengarde
felicity
dorothy
jim
burt
giles the fiddler
alan
ruth
alfred
children of alan and ruth
precious wilkins
sarah wilkins
rory wilkins
ghost of christmas present
turkish figs
spanish onions
french plums
produce sellers
mary
beth
topper
annabelle
thomas
ignorance
want
gang members
mrs. filcher
boy in sunday clothes
belle wilkins
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synopsis
A
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ct 1. scene 1. The city of London swirls with holiday activity as people rush to and
fro in the biting cold to ready themselves for Christmas. The irritable Scrooge badgers his workworn clerk, Bob Cratchit.
scene 2. Charitable gentlemen arrive at the office of Scrooge and Marley, only to be
told by an abrasive Scrooge that his former partner, Jacob Marley, died on Christmas Eve
seven years earlier. The gentlemen kindly ask for a contribution, and Scrooge responds
with a vicious tirade that there must surely be enough prisons and workhouses to accommodate those in need. He pushes the charitable gentlemen out of his office, refusing to
contribute any of his abundant wealth to the poor. Scrooge also refuses to grant Cratchit
a small piece of coal for the fire, forcing the clerk to return his freezing fingers to work.
Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, arrives and invites his uncle to have Christmas dinner with him
and his wife, Mary. Scrooge vehemently refuses and remains unpleasant to the last as Fred
leaves, undaunted, wishing all a merry Christmas.
The clock chimes signaling the end of the workday,
and Cratchit gratefully leaves.
scene 3. Scrooge leaves his office, cursing the
holiday revelers all the way home. At his front door,
Scrooge hears an eerie voice calling his name and sees
Marley’s ghostly face hovering before him.
Dismissing the apparition to fatigue, he enters his
house to be confronted by his housekeeper, Mrs.
Dilber, who fetches his gruel and readies him for bed.
After he is settled, Mrs. Dilber departs, cursing her
employer for insisting that she return in the morning
to care for him, even though it is Christmas Day.
Alone in the dark with his meager supper, Scrooge
reassures himself and retires to bed.
scene 4. In a terrifying burst of light and sound,
a spirit rises from below, calling out to Scrooge.
Identifying itself as the ghost of Jacob Marley, the
spirit explains to Scrooge that he has been condemned to drag behind him in the afterlife chains
that he forged with his own cruel and selfish behavior
in life. The ghost tells his former partner that there is
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hope for Scrooge, while he still lives, to avoid a similar fate. Marley informs Scrooge that
three spirits will visit him during the night in an attempt to inspire Scrooge to change his
own fate. As the ghost is sucked back into the void, the haunting sounds of the spirit world
echo through Scrooge’s bedchamber.
scene 5. As the clock chimes the fateful hour, a luminous spirit descends from above,
calling out to Scrooge to remember his long-forgotten former life. With the promise of
reclamation, the Ghost of Christmas Past guides Scrooge through scenes of his distant
past, first stopping at the school he attended as a boy. Scrooge sees younger versions of
himself and his friends happily anticipating their Christmas holiday. At the Schoolmaster’s
urging, the children scatter, heading for their homes—all except Scrooge, who has nowhere
to go and expects to spend a lonely holiday at the school. He is joyfully suprised by the
arrival of his sister, Little Fan, who has come to bring Ebenezer home to stay. Little Fan
gives Scrooge their mother’s ring and makes him promise to wear it always, and they happily rush off.
The Ghost of Christmas Past reminds Scrooge of his
refusal to have dinner with Fred, his sister’s only child, and
Scrooge shamefacedly remembers that he and Fan had
promised to always look after each other. The ghost brings
forth another memory from Scrooge’s past, and the scene
changes to a warehouse run by Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig, who
employed Ebenezer as a young man. The Fezziwigs’ generosity abounds as they host a holiday party and pass out
Christmas bonuses to all their young employees. The ghost
and Scrooge watch as his younger self flirts with Belle.
Scrooge is reminded of how little it took to
create so much cheer among so many young people. The
spirit then guides Scrooge forward a few years, as Scrooge’s
best friend, young Dick Wilkins, urges Ebenezer to attend
the annual Fezziwig party, especially since Belle is eagerly
expecting him; young Ebenezer insists, however, on returning to work, convinced that Belle will only want him if he is
rich. The scene progresses and Belle, compelled by loneliness,
sadly breaks off her engagement with Ebenezer, citing the
Costume sketches for Mr. and Mrs. Cratchit
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fact that he has become driven by an obsession with profit and she is no longer fit to be
his wife because she has no dowry to offer him.
With these memories burning his soul, Scrooge pleads with the Ghost of Christmas
Past to show him no more. One final vision appears, that of Belle as a young mother with
her husband, an older Dick Wilkins, their children, and their happy life. As frustration and
despair overwhelm Scrooge, he snuffs out the light of Christmas Past in defiance. The
haunting voice of Jacob Marley predicts the coming of the next spirit.
intermission
A
4
ct 11. scene 1. The Ghost of Christmas Present appears. The spirit explains that
all of humanity are its kin, recipients of an abundant supply of hope, good cheer, and
fulfillment. Tasty-looking fruits and vegetables roll across the stage as the Ghost of
Christmas Present conjures for Scrooge visions of the holiday season, which is celebrated
all around him, despite his humbug attitude. One scene is that of Fred and Mary’s joyous
dinner party, to which Scrooge has been invited. Fred defends Scrooge to his guests, ending with a toast to his absent uncle. Scrooge wistfully looks away, remembering again his
broken promise to Fan.
The ghost leads Scrooge to the next vision, that
of the penniless yet happy Cratchit family as they
gather for Christmas Eve, teasing each other playfully. In a moment of seriousness, Bob and his wife
discuss the failing health of their sickly son, Tiny
Tim, worrying over his increasing weakness. Bob
reassures his wife, and gives thanks to Scrooge, even
as Anne curses his name. Ever kind, Bob insists that
his family toast to his employer, and Christmas
Present escorts Scrooge away as the Cratchit family
sings his blessings.
The Cratchit family’s singing is lost amid the
growing din of unease as Christmas Present introduces Scrooge to Ignorance and Want, abrasive
youths who terrorize Scrooge for turning a blind
eye to those in need. As they fade, the bell chimes
once again to signal the coming of the third and
final spirit.
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scene 2. The Ghost of Christmas Future, a huge specter, rises and hovers above
Scrooge, who pleads to the Ghost for kindness. As the giant specter’s wings close and
open, we see businessmen callously talking crudely about someone recently deceased.
Scrooge watches with distress, demanding to know of whom they speak, when Mrs. Dilber
and Mrs. Filcher arrive. They begin divvying up the dead man’s possessions as Scrooge
cries out for kindness, realizing the dead man is himself. The women strip the corpse of
valuables, including his mother’s ring, and the scene changes to another scene of death:
the Cratchit family in a funeral procession carrying the child-size coffin of Tiny Tim.
Scrooge demands to know if these visions are certain to happen or merely things that may
come to pass. The Ghost of Christmas Future does not answer, but guides him into a
cemetery and to his very own tombstone. In terror, Scrooge vows to make amends in his
life and take the three spirits’ lessons to heart, in order to change the nightmare vision of
the future he has just seen.
scene 3. It is Christmas morning and Scrooge awakens, shaken by the terrifying
visions of the night before. As he realizes that he is back once again in his own room and
his own bed, and that the spirits have gone, he is giddy with relief that he is still alive and
still has a chance to mend his ways. He praises the holiday and the Ghosts for showing
him the way to happiness. Mrs. Dilber arrives and Scrooge demands to know the day.
When she confesses bitterly that it is indeed Christmas Day, Scrooge rejoices—and she
fears he has lost his mind. He asks her to dance and gives her a generous bonus before
sending her off to enjoy her holiday. Scrooge, still dressed in his nightshirt with a coat
thrown hastily over, enters the street and gives a boy enough money to go purchase the
huge prize turkey from the poulterer down the street and deliver it to the Cratchit family.
As Scrooge makes his way down the street, seeing everything with a new appreciation, he
encounters the charitable gentlemen he denied the day before and promises them a large
donation. Fred and Mary appear from the crowd to see what is happening and find
Scrooge. He embraces Fred and asks to still be included in their Christmas dinner, then
gives Mary the ring from his sister, insisting that it should be hers. As they are reuniting,
Bob Cratchit makes his way through the crowd with Tiny Tim. Scrooge pretends to be
angry with Cratchit, accusing him of failing to show up for work on Christmas Day. Bob
is stammering to explain when Scrooge breaks a smile and promises to raise his salary and
assist his needy family. Cratchit is overwhelmed with surprise when the boy arrives with
the huge turkey for his family. Belle Wilkins, Dick and Belle’s daughter, also meets Scrooge
on the street, and as the spirits of Christmas Past and Present return, all of London praise
the joys of the holiday season.
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a brief biography of charles dickens
by david elliott
C
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harles Dickens (1817–70) was born into
a comfortable home, knew real poverty,
and finally rose to become the wealthiest
writer in the world. His family background
was checkered: one grandfather had been a
domestic servant, another was an embezzler.
His father was a navy clerk, a man of tremendous vitality, but also a spendthrift who in
1824 was imprisoned for his debts. His many
failings and essential charm became the basis
for one of Dickens’s great characters, David
Copperfield’s Mr. Micawber.
The family’s descent into poverty—difficult to avoid with ten children to feed—
forced young Charles to abandon school in
1824 and go to work in a London blacking
warehouse. Disgraced and hating the drudgery of his work, he was further embittered
when, after his father’s fortunes recovered, his
mother wanted him to continue in manual labor. At 15, however, he became a clerk in a
solicitor’s office, and soon thereafter a court stenographer and newspaper reporter. Then
began his long, intimate love affair with London, the setting of almost all of his writings.
As the historian Walter Bagehot later said, Dickens “describes London like a special correspondent for posterity.”
Although attracted to the theater (he considered becoming an actor), Dickens finally
began to earn an income with his journalism. In 1833, at just 21, his stories and essays (later
published in Sketches by Boz [1836]) found a welcoming audience. The key to his fortune
came soon after when Dickens was asked to provide a comic narrative to accompany a
series of engravings. The resulting Pickwick Papers was an immediate success.
Dickens became in a sense the first “comic book artist,” and the serialization of his work
in the popular press—often illustrated by Cruikshank or “Phiz” (Hablot Brown)—earned
him an immense and demanding public. Major works began to roll from his pen: Oliver
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Twist, with its lush, sinister portrait of London’s
I have endeavored
underworld and its population of poverty-stricken
in this Ghostly little
children, was serialized and published in book form in
book, to raise the
1838. It was followed by Nicholas Nickleby (1839), The
Ghost of an Idea,
Old Curiosity Shop (1841), Barnaby Rudge (1841),
which shall not put my
Martin Chuzzlewit (1843), A Christmas Carol (1843),
readers out of humour
and his other enormously popular holiday tales.
with themselves, with
During a visit to the United States in 1842, his remarks
each other, with the
on copyright protection and in support of the aboliseason, or with me.
tion movement were met with hostility, and he replied
May it haunt their
with his own sharp criticism of American vulgarity in
houses pleasantly, and
American Notes (1842).
no one wish to lay it!
Beginning with the publication of Dombey and Son
Their faithful friend
in 1848, Dickens’s writing became increasingly refined,
and servant, C.D.
yet there was no break in his popularity. His works
were available everywhere, in periodicals as well as
—Charles Dickens,
onstage; at one time 20 London theaters were simulA Christmas Carol,
taneously presenting adaptations of Dickens stories.
December 1843
The gushingly sentimental “Death of Little Nell” was
an especial favorite.
Although Dombey had revealed a more penetrating criticism of the new industrial society, David Copperfield (1849), Dickens’s own favorite novel, returned to a world of boyhood
adventure and contained extensive autobiographical material. The 1850s, however, brought
the “dark trilogy” of Bleak House (1853), Hard Times (1854), and Little Dorrit (1857). With
these works Dickens’s characterizations became more subdued and his view of social injustice more pervasive.
Although shaken by the separation from his wife, Catherine Hogarth, in 1858 (caused
by his affair with the young actress Ellen Ternan) and exhausted by long speaking tours,
Dickens was far from finished as a writer. In 1859 came A Tale of Two Cities, which was a
huge success, followed the next year by Great Expectations. The latter book—now considered his masterpiece—revealed, in the character Pip, Dickens’s uncanny ability to enter the
mind of a child. His last works were Our Mutual Friend (1864), a stark criticism of money
values, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, based on the case of John Jasper, an
opium-addicted cathedral organist who murdered his nephew. Dickens literally died mid
sentence, and Drood was never finished, the author having truly worked himself to death.
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dreaming a new CAROL
by elizabeth brodersen (fall 2005)
look up! look up! look up, know me better!
for i am the spirit of christmas!
look up! look up! look up, know me better!
i have come to open your heart,
i am here to banish the darkness . . .
—A Christmas Carol, adapted by Carey Perloff and Paul Walsh
F
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rom June to August this year, the unlikely sounds of Christmas could be heard wafting through A.C.T.’s offices in San Francisco, as early visions of sugarplums and
holiday revelers danced their way across the rehearsal room floor just down the hall. This
is an auspicious moment for A.C.T., which, after producing 27 incarnations of the company’s beloved 1976 adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, has marshaled its
creative talent and energy to create a brand-new version that will premiere at the Geary
Theater in December.
When A.C.T. originally mounted Dickens’s classic Christmas tale nearly 30 years ago,
the Powers That Were felt optimistic that the show might be successful enough to return
for one more season. At the time, A.C.T.’s Carol, adapted by Dennis Powers and Laird
Williamson, was one of the few theatrical productions of Dickens’s 1843 novella being performed in the United States. Over the next three decades, however, the annual production
of A Christmas Carol became a cornerstone of the A.C.T. repertory, performed 832 times to
a collective audience of more than 775,000, employing nearly 1,000 actors (including seven
different Ebenezer Scrooges and hundreds of children) and 600 backstage staff along the
way. After successfully remounting the same production for three decades—using the same
set pieces, props, and costumes, with only occasional refurbishment—and in light of the
plethora of new Bay Area holiday productions, including the San Francisco Ballet’s new
Nutcracker, Best of Broadway’s new White Christmas, and Mark Morris’s The Hard Nut in
Berkeley—A.C.T.’s leadership deemed the summer of 2005 the perfect moment to breathe
new life and spirit into the company’s ever-popular holiday theatrical tradition.
“We went through incredible institutional soul-searching as we discussed Carol’s continuing significance to A.C.T.’s artists and audiences,” says Artistic Director Carey Perloff,
who ultimately decided to develop a new adaptation of Dickens’s text herself, in collabo-
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ration with dramaturg Paul Walsh.
“Contrary to popular belief, A Christmas
Carol is not a cash cow. It takes tremendous resources, in terms of staff time,
creative energy, and financial support, to
mount a production of such grand scale
each year, and we knew it would take even
more to create a new production from the
ground up. Yet there are deeply compelling reasons to keep this extraordinary
story in our repertory.”
Among those reasons is the multigenerational aspect of the production.
Featuring in each season’s cast the entire
third-year class of A.C.T.’s top-ranked
Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) Program, as
well as almost two dozen students from
the Young Conservatory (YC), A.C.T.’s
acclaimed program for actors aged 8 to
19), A Christmas Carol has played a critical
role in A.C.T.’s actor training curriculum, a
role also central to the development of the
new production.
Costume sketch for the Ghost of Christmas Past
Relationships among the cast of each
year’s Carol are fostered by a mentoring
program, in which each professional actor mentors an M.F.A. Program cast member, who
in turn mentors a yc student; thus each generation helps usher the succeeding one into the
life of the working theater artist. “This production announces to the world that young people are central to A.C.T.’s aesthetic experience,” adds Perloff. “Our M.F.A. Program, led by
Melissa Smith, and our Young Conservatory, led by Craig Slaight, are incredible, and here
is our chance to really celebrate them and say, ‘Look what this institution can do.’”
Despite the stiff new competition looming literally around the corner last winter, audiences continued to flock to Carol, and it became evident that the A.C.T. production has
become a vital part of the wider Bay Area community’s holiday experience. “We discovered
just how passionate people are about A Christmas Carol,” says Perloff. “Dramatizations of
this story seem to have become an important ecumenical American ritual at holiday time,
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regardless of individual religious background or faith. Seeing Carol is an experience that
people yearn to have, year after year. It is a remarkable story, a secular tale about transformation and the imagination.
“I also think we have to remember the number of people who are part of this company’s
life who came first to A.C.T. to see A Christmas Carol, and that every year we have audiences who are seeing theater for the very first time.”
a new script and music
Because her vision for Carol at A.C.T. was so particular, and included so many more children and young people than any version she could find, Perloff, a playwright in her own
right (A Colossus of Rhodes, Luminescence Dating), finally sat down with dramaturg Paul
Walsh (whose previous translations and adaptations for A.C.T. have included A Doll’s
House, Creditors, and Edward II) to begin work on a brand-new adaptation for A.C.T. They
immediately went back to Dickens’s original novella.
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Sketch of the set for A Christmas Carol by John Arnone
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Taking advantage of the opportunity to tailor the script to A.C.T.’s needs, Walsh and
Perloff set ground rules for the new version. The first rule: No narrator. Dickens himself,
a familiar presence in many dramatic interpretations of the tale (including A.C.T.’s previous version), no longer makes an appearance onstage. “We were excited to see whether
everything that happened could be dramatized,” says Perloff. “There are many ‘story theater’ versions [of A Christmas Carol]. I wanted to see if we could really make this a play.”
The second rule: Create two 40-minute acts with an intermission (fidgety children
often had a hard time sitting through the previous version’s 100-minute playing time).
The third rule was to stay true to the unique rhythms of Dickens’s language. “We
wanted to see if we could find a language for the script that echoed Dickens’s,” says Perloff.
“His descriptive passages are filled with surprisingly sensual adjectives and active gerunds.
I thought it would be wonderful to preserve the kinetic energy of his descriptive prose.”
Adds Walsh, “Dickens wrote his stories and novels nearly two centuries ago to be read
aloud, so they’re already performative, in a sense. They have a cadence that’s meant to be
heard, and words that, while sometimes unfamiliar, are wonderfully theatrical. So we’ve
held to as much of Dickens’s language as is practical within our adaptation, at the same
time trying to make sure that everything is crystal clear moment by moment and celebratory of the imaginative possibilities of Dickens’s own text.”
Music is integral to the development of the new adaptation. Composer Karl Fredrik
Lundeberg (who scored Ibsen’s A Doll’s House for A.C.T., as well as numerous projects for
film and television) is writing all new music for the production, including several songs and
underscoring to provide Carol ’s dramatic action with narrative continuity and an overall
sense of magic and celebration. “When I reread Carol after not reading it for 25 years, I was
struck by how comical and wry the writing is,” says Lundeberg. “It almost reminded me of
P. G. Wodehouse. So the lyrics for the songs were already there, in the text. Carey would
take the first pass at ordering the words in a musical way, and then I would musicalize it.
It’s an interesting way to create a book for a musical, because Charles Dickens is the lyricist.”
Lundeberg’s score draws from a wide variety of traditions, from the folk tunes of his
Norwegian family’s musical roots to contemporary American gospel. “Subliminally, the
music needs to have a lightness to it,” he says. “I ended up writing a lot of the melodies in
what’s called the Lydian mode [in which the fourth note of a major scale is raised a half
step], which gives them a sort of a lift. Because this is a piece that’s going to be done, hopefully over many years, by people of different ages and levels of training, I didn’t want the
melodies to be complex, but I did want the harmonies to be interesting, and as they keep
shifting beneath the melodies, things move along faster.”
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fantastical design
Also crucial to the collaborative development process has been the involvement of the
Carol design team, which includes, in addition to Lundeberg, Tony Award–winning scenic
designer John Arnone (Lennon, The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?, and The Full Monty, among
many others, on Broadway), costume designer Beaver Bauer (most recently, The Gamester
and The Goat for A.C.T.), lighting designer Nancy Schertler (The Real Thing, Hilda, Levee
James, and Texts for Nothing for A.C.T.), sound designer Jake Rodriguez (The Colossus of
Rhodes for A.C.T.), and San Francisco Ballet choreographer Val Caniparoli (A Doll’s House
for A.C.T.). The team’s participation began early in the script writing process, accelerating
during workshops of the draft text held at A.C.T.’s studios last summer.
The visual aesthetic of the new production reflects Perloff and Walsh’s desire to imagine Carol the way Dickens might have if he had created a production today. “I felt the
production should be much more dreamlike, like the book, which is very filmic,” says
Perloff. “It cuts back and forth in time; it’s written in this fantastic way. So instead of
detailing Scrooge’s adventure with the ghosts in a linear structure, we tell his story in a kind
of swirling pageant with scenes dotted throughout.
“We also decided that, while we will keep the setting loosely Victorian, we’re not going
to be a slave to that period. The design is in no way realistic, because this is at its core a piece
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A.C.T.’s A Christmas Carol, 2009: A reformed Scrooge (James Carpenter, center) celebrates
the season with his nephew, Fred (Philip Mills, right), and the Cratchits: Bob (A.C.T. core acting company member Gregory Wallace), Anne (A.C.T. core acting company member René
Augesen), and Tiny Tim (Calum John). Photo by Kevin Berne.
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about magic and change. Dickens said that, if the ghosts could appeal to the imagination of
this man such that he could ultimately believe in them, he would be transformed.”
Known for her inventive designs for the theater, Bauer took to heart her assignment to
make the ghosts “scary and surprising.” Representing the combination of gorgeous costuming and ingenious stagecraft, they embody Dickens’s descriptions in his original text:
Christmas Past is a candle, lit from within, who descends on a swing; Present is a Bacchic
spirit of fecundity and abundance who sings a full-voiced gospel-like tune; Future is a
gigantic puppet that flies across the stage on tie-lines. “The ghosts are intentionally
androgynous,” says Perloff. “The point is that they are otherworldly, filled with light and
unlike ordinary humans; they swing in from the rafters, they rise up from the depths below
the stage on elevators. They hang above like specters. They transport.”
scrooge’s journey back to community
Perloff and Walsh were particularly interested in the inherently theatrical possibilities of
the ghost story that lies at the heart of Dickens’s tale. “I think, for Laird [Williamson] and
Dennis [Powers], A Christmas Carol was a piece about the Solstice, very much about darkness and light,” says Perloff. “For me, it’s also about the imagination. Dickens had a
profound belief in fantastical storytelling. He told this particular ghost story in the belief
that, if you could trigger a person’s imagination, you could trigger their humanity. I believe
that’s really what he was trying to do with this story.”
“In rereading a classic text like A Christmas Carol,” adds Walsh, “we always read from
where we are today. Reading Carol this time, what we found was that Dickens in fact chose
to write a ghost story. It’s not a story about the trials and travails of Victorian England, or
about child labor and the abuse of children; he wrote many books about that. This is a
much simpler story, about a man who has allowed himself to be separated from community and then is called back to community. He eventually finds his way back into the fold,
because he’s been changed by the telling of the story.
“A Christmas Carol celebrates the possibility of theater to evoke and maybe even effect
change on behalf of community, because we watch theater as a community. Theater celebrates that sense not of the individual, but of the individual in society, in community, and
that’s the story that A Christmas Carol tells.”
Fundamentally, A.C.T.’s new Carol is a gift to the entire Bay Area community of theater
artists and audiences. “One of the reasons this has been a very challenging process,” says
Perloff, “is that we’re trying to do all this as imaginatively and efficiently as possible, so we
don’t have to charge high ticket prices.We want this show to be affordable to the widest
possible audience. This story is for all of us.”
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interviews with members of the creative
team for A CHRISTMAS CAROL
by elizabeth brodersen (summer/fall 2005)
carey perloff, co-adaptor and director
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some of the most basic questions about this project are: why are
we doing a new CAROL ? how is it going to be different from a.c.t.’s
old production? what are your goals, and how have they changed
during the process of developing this piece?
We went through incredible soul-searching as we discussed Carol ’s continuing significance
to a.c.t. artists and audiences. Contrary to popular belief, A Christmas Carol is not a cash
cow. It takes tremendous resources, in terms of staff time, creative energy, and financial
support to mount a production of such grand scale each year, and we knew it would take
even more to create a new production. Yet there are deeply compelling reasons to keep this
extraordinary story in our repertory. Among the foremost reasons is the multigenerational
aspect of the production. Every winter, Carol announces to the world that young people
are central to a.c.t.’s aesthetic experience. Our Master of Fine Arts (m.f.a.) Program and
Young Conservatory (yc) are incredible, and here is our chance to celebrate them and say,
“Look what this institution can do.”
We also realized that one of the amazing things about theater is the degree to which it
swims in a river of its own time, that any great classic is reflected in the present moment.
The particular way A Christmas Carol, the novel, was adapted 29 years ago was very much
a reflection of its own moment, historically and theatrically. Theater has changed so much,
our theater in particular. In the intervening years, the earthquake hit and the Geary collapsed, and it was rebuilt as one of the great fly houses in the country. It is fully trapped, it
has all kinds of bells and whistles that the Geary never had before that could be used to
great effect to tell this story, this ghost story, which is what Dickens called his novel.
But for some time the jury was out [on whether we would continue producing Carol],
and I kept thinking, for instance, about all the local competition. There’s a new White
Christmas next door [at the Curran]; there’s a new Nutcracker [at sf Ballet]. But what we
discovered is just how passionate people are about A Christmas Carol. Even last year, it sold
extremely well, and it isn’t replicable. It isn’t like the Nutcracker. It isn’t like White
Christmas. A Christmas Carol as a story isn’t like anything else. It is the most remarkable,
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secular, and deeply humanistic tale about transformation and about the imagination, which
makes it purely theatrical.
This emphasis on the imagination just jumped out at me when I reread the novel.
Dickens really felt that if he could create a character as desiccated, as cut off—the word
“Scrooge” comes from a word meaning “squeeze, ”and Scrooge has really squeezed every
drop of joyfulness out of himself—could it be possible to somehow trigger his own empathy? Is it possible to bring somebody like that back into the world? I think the entire journey of Carol is about triggering someone’s empathy and imagination, such that someone
persecuted and removed from society finds a way back into the family of man.
Dickens was also playing with the idea of the ghost story. Could he create a situation in
which this man was forced to believe in these three ghosts? So, of course in the beginning
Scrooge is saying, I don’t believe in any of this, it’s rubbish, its humbug, but slowly he starts
to believe, and that is the power and artistry of the imagination.
I went and talked to [San Franciso Ballet Artistic Director] Helgi Tomasson, and he
told me that the ballet had faced the same question: Why a new Nutcracker? And he told
me, “If you want Carol to be important to a.c.t., you have to do it. You have to put it at
the center of your agenda.” I had never thought about doing a new adaptation myself.
Never. And I remember this long lunch in January with [co-adaptor] Paul [Walsh] when
I first brought it up. I had no idea what he was
going to think of this—and then we went for it.
We agreed to keep everything we treasure about
the old version, but to otherwise start from
scratch. We worked out a system that we never
really had to articulate. I said I would do the
songs, and went away and did the lyrics, while
Paul pulled all the dialogue from the book that
we thought we wanted. Then we just looked at
it scene by scene and kept going off to work on
our own and then bringing things back to each
other. It was surprisingly easy. We didn’t feel the
least bit territorial, or that we were writing in
two different voices. It all seemed very clear,
which in part is because from the beginning we
set ourselves some ground rules.
Annabelle at Fred’s party
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what were the ground rules?
First, no narration. We were excited to see whether everything that happens in the novel
could be dramatized. There are many “story theater” versions of A Christmas Carol. I wanted
to see if we could really make this a play. When a.c.t. first did Carol [in 1976], it was more
customary for children to be read aloud to, but I do think children for better or worse have
shorter attention spans now. In the previous version, because there was so much time spent
on setting the scene and narration, we didn’t get to Marley until 40 minutes into the first
act. I thought, This is a ghost story! We need to be at the first ghost within 15 minutes. The
second rule: we decided that while we will keep it in Victorian England, we’re not going to
be slaves to that setting. We didn’t want it to be realistic because it’s a piece about the imagination. So the ghosts have to drive it. The third rule: create two 40-minute acts with an
intermission. Children had a hard time sitting through the longer version. And one of the
fun things about coming to our theater is intermission. You get to wander that gorgeous
space and look down that beautiful staircase and go into the balconies.
We also wanted to create three distinct worlds for the ghosts of Past, Present, and
Future. Christmas Past sings, “Do you remember?” We like to think that is an easy verb,
but memory can be a very fraught, difficult thing; particularly if you’ve had an unhappy
childhood, remembering things about your past can be painful and confusing. Part of what
Christmas Past wants Scrooge to feel are the sensations he felt as a child, when he was
more available to be touched by life, by others.
Christmas Present is about seduction, in a way: sensual and lively and very pleasurable,
with the vibrancy and light of the present moment that you wish Scrooge would enter into.
Future is about terrorizing somebody with the potential consequences of his behavior.
So the ghost of Christmas Future in our production is a terrifying presence that rises up
above the Geary stage, reminding and warning Scrooge of what will happen to him and
his own culture if he doesn’t take responsibility for contributing to the world around him.
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how did you approach the novel and decide what to keep?
We went through the novel very carefully and looked at Scrooge’s psychological journey.
When you first meet him [in the book], he is a lonely schoolboy, and he seems to be sort
of an abandoned child. There is a suggestion that his mother died in childbirth and that
his father has had a very hard time with it. The novel also implies a kind of crossroads
moment where Scrooge chooses money and wealth over love and family. Now, I wouldn’t
say that the moral of Carol is “Money is a terrible thing,” but I do think the piece is about
what happens when money and work become such obsessions that one’s primary connection to the world gets severed. That’s what happens to Scrooge. He starts as someone who
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knows how to love: he loves Fan; he falls in love with Belle; he has Dick as a good friend.
And then what happens to him? Dickens gives us an incredible scene where Scrooge
breaks up with Belle, and that turning-point scene was missing [from a.c.t.’s old version].
That’s really the choice that puts him on the wrong path.
I also felt the production should be much more dreamlike, like the book, which is very
filmic. It cuts back and forth in time in this fantastic way. So instead of detailing Scrooge’s
adventure with the ghosts in a conventionally linear scene-scene-scene structure, we tell his
story in a kind of swirling pageant with scenes dotted throughout. So, for example, the
Fezziwig dance represents the passage of time, as told in the evolution of Scrooge’s relationship with Belle.
The other thing I wanted to see is if we could find a language for the script that echoes
Dickens’s. His descriptive passages are filled with surprisingly sensual adjectives and active
gerunds. I thought it would be wonderful to preserve the kinetic energy of his descriptive
prose. I chose lines I love, like the words about how cold it is, “stamping, biting,” and the
descriptive “clinking, clanking money,” and just tried to create lyrics out of that. It was the
same with the descriptions of the fruit. One thing that struck me when I reread the novel
was how incredibly sensual it is. Particularly in Christmas Present. It made me think of an
English cookbook by Elizabeth David called Mediterranean Food, which came out during
World War II, when the English were doing without so much. Dickens’s descriptions of
the foods of Christmas reminded me so much of David’s sense of the sort of miracle of
Mediterranean bounty. I thought, here we are in Victorian England [in Carol], and it’s cold
and dark, and suddenly someone sees an olive. A fig. It’s about Christmas’s seductiveness.
did you think about dickens’s own motives or inspirations?
What we realized is that Dickens was not just writing this out of altruism. A big part of
his message is that it is in your own best interest to be benevolent, and to have a connection to your society, because, if not, the society would be a culture of insurgents and criminality, which is what we know now. And we should realize that that transformation happens to Scrooge in many ways: it happens through Christmas Past reminding him explicitly; it also happens because he feels threatened. He is warned about what will happen to
Tiny Tim, and his own responsibility. Dickens wasn’t scared of saying, You are responsible. Each one of us is responsible. He really thought that every single individual carries the
potential to change themselves, to change the world, to change the way people are treated.
So we’re trying to chart several different actions: What is each spirit trying to do to
Scrooge, and how does he resist? And how can we make him resist as long as possible, to
keep it dramatic?
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paul [walsh] uses the word “reclamation,” instead of “redemption,”
to describe scrooge’s journey. what is your feeling about that?
I think it’s important not to make this religious in any obvious sense, and “redemption”
sounds like a very Christian term. It isn’t the word Dickens uses. In fact, there is only one
mention of church in the entire novel, which is when Tiny Tim and Bob [Cratchit] are
walking out of church and they hear somebody saying, “It would be nice at Christmas to
remember who made the lame to walk and the blind to see.” It seems to me, oddly enough,
that A Christmas Carol has become an important ecumenical American ritual at holiday
time. We need rituals, but there are many people for whom the standard Christian or
Jewish or other religious rituals don’t particularly speak to them. There’s no other play that
is such an incredibly important annual ritual for so many people from diverse backgrounds.
the costume sketches of the ghosts are just wonderful.
I wanted them to be totally androgynous spirits. This year we’re looking at them being
played by women, but in the future they could be played by men. The point is that they are
otherworldly, filled with light, and not like ordinary humans. Their locomotion is different: they swing and rise up on elevators; they hang above like specters and transport.
what can you share about the ghost of christmas present?
In the book, Christmas Present is described as a Bacchic spirit of fecundity, an image of
the cornucopia, wearing a green velvet robe, growing holly and leaves, with fruit hanging
everywhere, while emanating light and exuding fertility. I have been torn with this idea of
it being a woman, because I love the idea of Scrooge confronting a female fertility spirit in
a play about a character with an absent mother.
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what about christmas future?
The ghost of Christmas Future is an evanescent specter, a puppet made of mesh. It looks
terrifying and starts roped to the ground, and then rises up until it’s this enormous presence that envelops [Scrooge] with its wings. The design for this show has been an
absolutely integral part of the writing process from the beginning. John [Arnone, scenery],
Beaver [Bauer, costumes], and Karl [Lundeberg, music] have very much been part of the
writing in the sense of responding to it.
and christmas past?
Christmas Past is a flickering candle. This emanating light is important because it’s the
symbol of the imagination, that Scrooge’s mind is about to be “enlightened.” There is a
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metaphor throughout the play of Scrooge’s blindness. People say to him, “Open your eyes,
blind man. Look up.” But he can’t see. Literally, he cannot see what they are offering him.
He can’t remember his own past. He can’t see how wonderful Fred and Mary and his family are, that there is a community out there for him. So, the journey of the piece from darkness into light is also a man’s journey from blindness into seeing, into opening his eyes to
the possibilities of the world—and the candle is the flickering beginning.
what are some casting choices that people might not expect?
Christmas Past is very young. She’s played by an m.f.a. Program student, and she’s alone
on a swing, in this fabulous opalescent makeup that makes her look like a sort of ancient
candle. Also, Christmas Past no longer has a family, as in the previous production. Mrs.
Dilber is a favorite of mine right now; she’s a bit I stole from the [1951] Alastair Sim movie
[Scrooge], which I love. We watched so many of the old movies, and they each have their
own ridiculous and wonderful things. I loved [in the Sim movie] that there was somebody
for Scrooge to mistreat early on, in addition to Bob Crachit. He’s terrible to Mrs. Dilber.
So I made him insist that she bring him his tea on Christmas morning, so she couldn’t go
home for the holiday. Dick Wilkins is much more present now. We have Dick as a boy, and
we have Dick as a young man. He is Scrooge’s best friend, and we see him marry Belle,
and we see that relationship later on.
will more of the roles be played by m.f.a. program students?
We did write more roles for them. We tried to really think how many roles—the
Charitables, the Businessmen, Fred’s friends at his party, for example—could work with
the students. Not only are there more roles for them, but they have more to do, because
many of them come onstage more often. And there are more roles for [yc] children, too.
is there anything else you’re thinking about, in terms of the
community of CAROL ?
I think we always have to remember the number of people who are part of a.c.t.’s life who
first came to a.c.t. to see A Christmas Carol. Every year it’s in part an audience that’s seeing theater for the first time. That’s an important and inspiring thing. My hope is that this
new piece will continue the tradition of welcoming a whole new generation of theatergoers to our theater and to the world of theatrical transformation. It’s important for the
actors to remember that when you’re standing on that stage, somebody is sitting out there
seeing live theater for the very first time, and you will be what they remember years later.
They will say, “I saw that performance, and it changed me.”
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paul walsh, co-adaptor
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are there any particular principles or ideas that have guided the
creation of this new adaptation of A CHRISTMAS CAROL ?
The question came up as we were working: What is the key word of the text? What is the
key action of the play? Dickens uses the word “reclamation.” As Scrooge talks about the
various incarnations of Christmas, and asks them what their purpose is, they say it’s to
reclaim. It took me a long time to figure out why Dickens uses that word in particular. In
part, I think it was because he was leaving to God the things that are God’s, and claiming
for man the things that are man’s, claiming for society the things that are of society. So he’s
not pretending to be a godlike author in his writing. He is claiming a social position as a
writer.
Reclamation and redemption are somewhat different, in ways that are relevant to a discussion of Carol. Redemption is more spiritual. Redemption has a sense of something that
happens between you and your god, of your god reaching down and cleansing you, redeeming you, saving you by bringing you into your spiritual wholeness. Whereas reclamation is
something that society does, reclaiming its lost or discarded members. Whereas God can
resurrect and only God can redeem, humanity reclaims.
I like the notion that reclamation has this social connotation. In the same way we
reclaim natural resources through recycling, we reclaim lost individuals who’ve been in a
sense squandered or have squandered themselves, squandered their goodwill on behalf of
some personal perversity, and as a result are lost to the community. A community needs
those possibilities, those individuals, to be full again. So the entire Carol story is about the
reclaiming of Scrooge, as well as about our own reclamation, as members of the audience—
about our own reclaiming of the spirit of Christmas, which is a spirit of both generosity
and prolixity, a profusion of sensual celebration on behalf of community, on behalf of the
season, and on behalf of ourselves. So, if we do our job right [with the adaptation and production], we should each be reclaimed in the same way that Scrooge is reclaimed by the
end of the play. Of course, we do it with less pain. We don’t have to be visited by increasingly insistent spirits.
The spirit of Christmas Past is a wonderful, inviting spirit who says to Scrooge, Come
back to what used to be, remember what used to be and who you used to be, and see if you
can come back in touch with that long-lost part of yourself. Scrooge watches his past as it’s
revealed to him, sometimes sentimentally, sometimes with a shortness. But that vision
alone doesn’t make him a changed man. Instead, Christmas Present must come in more
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insistently and say, Look here, look up. Join in this celebration, of which you should naturally be a part.
Scrooge does listen and starts on the path to reclamation, but he still has a long way to
go. So then Christmas Future arrives and is absolutely terrifying, because it says nothing.
Christmas Future just points at what the consequences of Scrooge’s actions will be, and
those consequences are dire. They are dire for Scrooge, and they are dire for all of us. When
the gang violence of Want and Ignorance bursts upon the stage, it is a warning to us all of
what could happen if we don’t reclaim a true sense of community, for the community of us
all in the theater, the larger community of San Francisco, and indeed the community of the
world. This is why I think A Christmas Carol is such an exciting and important prospect
for the theater. It celebrates the possibility of theater to evoke and maybe even effect a
change on behalf of community, because we watch theater as a community. We participate
in the theater as a community, and this play celebrates not just the individual, but the individual in society.
how did you approach the new adaptation?
When rereading a story like A Christmas Carol, we always read in the context of where we
are today. What I found this time was that Dickens had chosen to write a ghost story. Carol
is not a story about the trials and travails of life in Victorian England. Dickens had written many books about that subject, but Carol is not about child labor or the abuse of children in industrialized London. This is a much simpler story. It’s a story about a man who
has allowed himself to be separated from community and then is called back to community, first by these ghosts, these residual memories of his, and then by the community itself.
He may come back into the fold kicking and screaming, but he comes back by the end willingly because he’s been changed by the telling of the story. So we really wanted to focus on
that quality.
That journey is effected through an activation of Scrooge’s imagination. Dickens is
wonderful at activating all kinds of things in his storytelling through the use of a very
imaginative vocabulary and writing style. We wanted to find a theatrical metaphor that
was equivalent to Dickens’s incredible prose, that would help our audiences join in
Scrooge’s imaginative journey, and therefore join in his reclamation.
what about dickens’s language? what is he like to work with as an
adaptor?
Dickens wrote his stories and novels nearly two centuries ago to be read aloud, so they’re
already performative, in a sense. They have a cadence that’s meant to be heard, and words
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that, while sometimes unfamiliar, are wonderfully theatrical. So we’ve held to as much of
Dickens’s language as is practical within our adaptation, at the same time trying to make
sure that everything is crystal clear moment by moment and celebratory of the imaginative possibilities of Dickens’s own text.
karl lundeberg, composer
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how would you describe yourself as a composer? your background
is in jazz, right?
I’m a classically trained jazz musician who has played a lot of folk music and loves rock ’n’
roll. I don’t like opera, and I don’t like musical theater. I got into writing music in the theater completely by accident. I hadn’t ever thought about it. I was living in Boston and, yes,
I had a jazz group for 15 or 20 years. But I was actually trained classically. The first music
I played was either Norwegian folk music, or Motown, gospel, and Beatles music. It’s
funny because I’m just getting back into that now. I’ve spent many years in avant-garde jazz
and modern classical music.
Because there’s so much music out there today, I think that a purely classical composer
is a bit of a dead horse in this day and age. The same goes, as far as I’m concerned, with
hard-line jazz people. And opera. I think modern composers need to not only have their
eyes and minds open to all the different types of music that contribute to whatever the next
music is going to be, but they have to have some experience in them. So, doing graduate
studies in the New England Conservatory, studying classical orchestration and all that, was
every bit as important to me as learning gospel piano from the piano player at the black
church we went to in Washington, and listening to the Beatles. It’s all important.
I got into writing for theater in Boston at the American Repertory Theatre (a.r.t.); the
first show I ever did was King Stag, with Julie Taymor. A friend of mine, who was running
a Javanese gamelan orchestra I used to hang out and listen to, got a call from the a.r.t.,
asking, “Do you know a jazz musician who knows a bit about Javanese gamelan music and
who can improvise?” “Well, he’s sitting right here.” The a.r.t. back then was into nontraditional music—[Brian] Eno and Laurie Anderson and Philip Glass—so that’s what I
thought writing music for the theater was about. I learned later that that’s not necessarily
so. The one “musical” musical I did was a piece with Eric Overmyer at Baltimore’s
CENTERSTAGE, about 20 years ago. I remember a critic from the Washington Post said, “If
you like your musical theater to sound like Steely Dan, this is the piece for you.” I took that
as a great compliment.
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can you describe your process of developing the musical style of
the new A CHRISTMAS CAROL ?
I started out talking with Carey about what the musical language of the play was going to
be, because it is set in its [Victorian] period. And none of us wanted it to sound like musical theater. So, since I wanted the score to sound like it could have come out of the 19th
century, I started thinking we were going to use violins and harps, real instruments—no
electronic stuff. Carey agreed with the decision to use music that could have been played
in the 19th century, but in a harmonic language that is a little more modern.
what came first in writing the songs, the lyrics or the music?
carey talks about rewriting the lyrics at the beginning of the
piece, and you doing something to make it all rhythmical. it
sounds like an interesting sort of collaboration.
She already had most of the lyrics, and then I would reposition things to make it all fit a
little better musically. Sometimes things rhyme and sometimes they don’t. Of course all the
words are basically right out of Dickens. And they’re very good lyrics, because there are
lots of delicious, flavorful words. When I reread A Christmas Carol after not reading it for
25 years, I was really struck by how comical and wry it is. It almost reminded me of
p. g. Wodehouse’s writing. It’s fun language, so it just became a question of reordering
those terrific words into a musical language. Carey would take the first pass, and then I
would musicalize it. It’s an interesting way to create a “book” for a musical show, because
you don’t have a lyricist. Charles Dickens is the lyricist, in a way. Carey is the doctor of the
lyrics. I foul them up a little and make them more musical. So that’s really it.
do you have any thematic concepts in your head as you’re working
on the music?
Well, it’s funny because the very first song we were writing had to be very energetic and
very light. The words are “piercing, piercing, piercing,” etc. This might be more musical
and harmonic theory than people want to read about [laughter], but I ended up writing a
lot of the melodies in what’s called the Lydian mode [in which the fourth note of a major
scale is raised a half step], which gives them a sort of a lift. Because this is a piece that’s
going to be done, hopefully, over many years, by people of different ages and levels of training, I didn’t want the melodies to be complex, but I did want the harmonies to be interesting, and as they keep shifting beneath the melodies, things move along faster.
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do you work with literary, as opposed to musical, concepts at the
same time? for example, carey and paul have emphasized the idea
of “reclamation,” making the point that this version of CAROL is
about rejoining community.
I think [about those ideas] subliminally, in an awareness that the musical pieces have to
have a lightness to them; there’s enough heaviness with the ghosts. I’m Norwegian, and
Christmas in Norway has been celebrated for thousands of years as a winter solstice festival. It has nothing to do with religion, and I think that’s part of what this [Carol] is about.
A festival is about uplift, about people being together for one day of the year on which they
don’t think about themselves, but instead think about everybody else, which is a happy,
positive, light thing. My mother’s family were all Norwegian folk musicians, so I’ve played
Norwegian folk music ever since I was a little kid. The song they play in the Fezziwig party
is actually an old Scandinavian folk tune I know from my family, the kind of tune they—
and the Fezziwigs—would be dancing to with a fiddler.
do you think of this as a score or as a kind of soundtrack, with
individual songs?
It is going to be a score. The trick to that is to have an economy of themes that you use,
variations of songs or song themes and melodic motifs as underscoring. I’ll find out more
once the rehearsal process starts. It will have as much music in it as a musical, yet I thoroughly agree with the concept of a “play with music.” Anything to keep away from the “M
[for ‘musical’] word.” [laughter]
john arnone, scenic designer
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how did you become interested in this project?
Carey and I go way back. We met while working on Steve Reich’s The Cave, which was
prior to her becoming artistic director of a.c.t. We actually hadn’t been in touch since
then, until we found ourselves on the same plane to New York. I was heading back after
doing the Lennon try-outs at the Orpheum, and she was on her way to supervise the [New
York production of the] play she wrote, Luminescence Dating. And she asked me, “Would
you design A Christmas Carol?” I said, “Sure.” I thought at first she was talking about Carol
for 2006—but, no [laugh]. So, I said, “We better have a production meeting.” There was
an empty seat next to hers, and we had a preliminary production meeting right there on
the plane.
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what did you talk about at that first meeting? how did you
approach the project?
I think we focused more on the origins of the piece, because at that point she only had
about a three-page outline; there wasn’t a script to show me. It was clear that it was a very
true adaptation of the novel, trying to take what was best about Dickens’s storytelling and
translate that into a stage story, so that there was dramatic action, a theatrical arc, and
songs. Then, we began to identify a structure based on the writing she had done to date,
and divide it up into its dramatic parts. We discussed the town and its atmosphere, the
context for the piece, which was Dickens’s London. We looked at a lot of Gustave Doré
etchings, which convey the feeling of the congestion and the industrialization and urbanization, as well as the claustrophobia, paranoia, fear, and dark qualities. Then we discussed
the interiors, and the fact that there is only one interior that is real—Scrooge’s bedroom.
It’s very claustrophobic, an internalized black box. I think it is somewhat of a metaphor for
Scrooge’s own interior life, his soul, his incredibly fettered heart, and how dark his life has
become. Then the black box is transformational and opens up to [the ghosts of ] Christmas
Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Future, again a metaphor for how everything
grows out of this very dark interior. Then of course there were discussions about the nature
of the conveyance of Christmas Past and Present.
the flying?
Yes, right, how they could all come down to earth, so to speak. At some point they are each
somehow elevated. We also talked a lot about casting, and there was a strong feeling that
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Color elevation for the schoolhouse hanger in the set of A Christmas Carol, designed by John Arnone
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Christmas Past and Present were to be women. Christmas Future was sort of indeterminate at the time, although we discussed Scrooge being presented with a sort of feminine
aspect that is able to expose to him not only his present life but where his life is going to
lead if he doesn’t change his ways. The idea of that sort of sexual energy unlocking his soul
seemed important, in terms of the feminine influence over this old, crotchety man, that it
takes the feminine to get underneath that hard shell, into the depth of his soul. So it
wasn’t just set design we talked about.
how did you get the idea for christmas future as a puppet?
We were looking at all sorts of things. You never see [Christmas Future] in full detail, so
you never really know what it is you’re looking at. It’s more of a frightening hovering presence, actually terrifying, and it serves as a sort of host for the last part of the production,
which is what we call the “nightmare sequence.” Christmas Future became a sort of
scenic element, since I had been thinking that, first of all, it isn’t real. It is surreal and
otherworldly and larger than life. And it could act as a device to introduce the different
scenes of the nightmare sequence: the businessmen talking about someone’s death; the
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Model of the set for A Christmas Carol designed by John Arnone
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Dilber/Filcher sequence, in which they steal the bedclothes off of Scrooge’s bed; the Tiny
Tim funeral; and then Scrooge in the cemetery seeing and falling into his own grave. So
this specter evolved into a scenic device to introduce all of these elements.
Christmas Present exits, dematerializes, through the spirit of Christmas Future, and
then the businessmen materialize through the specter. And then Dilber and Filcher dematerialize through the specter again. And when we then fly the specter out, it becomes a
hovering presence over the classic turn-of-the-century scene, which is the death of the
child. At this point, Scrooge has been softened enough by Christmas Present and
Christmas Past that [the child’s death] actually has some meaning for him when he sees
it. Then there is only one scene left, for Scrooge to fall into his own grave, which is the
conclusion of the nightmare. I don’t know what horror movie out of the ’70s or ’80s
doesn’t feature someone coming out of their grave or falling into their grave as being the
ultimate experience that everyone dreads—death.
what else inspired you in developing these concepts, in addition
to the doré? i’m thinking of early 20th-century films.
Well, you always think of Murnau and Nosferatu and his Faust, but in all honesty we went
back to the Brian Desmond Hurst movie, Scrooge (1951), with Alastair Sim playing Scrooge.
I even ran it through my computer and pulled images from it, because it is very true to the
novel in its specificity. And it is in black and white, and I think of our show as basically in
black and white as well.
the set model looks very colorful, though.
The town does look like it’s colorful, but it’s dark, and it can go even darker. We were looking at some artistic techniques, such as watercolor, that could be abstract, dreamlike, and
impressionistic—and also somewhat frightening. In between the bookend scenes of the
town, there are accents of red, but we really wanted to leave the color palette open to the
costume designer, because there are so many characters in the piece and it would be more
advantageous for her to have some freedom with the color, to help tell the story through
color progressions and developments in costuming.
to get back to the puppet/specter, literally, how will it work? do
you know yet what it ’s made of?
We’re still developing the puppet, and it’s very much like a see-through scrim. It’s silklike
fabric that shimmers, is very diaphanous, and can blow in the wind. It has a birdlike
feeling; we were using images of a raven, like the bird of death. If we’re successful with its
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execution, it won’t be so specific as, Oh, look at that bird. It also resembles the peaks of the
roofs in the town, using an abstract version of a similar [visual] language. It has four extension poles that operate the wings, which are held by four actors. They can operate these
wing extensions backwards and forwards and up and down. We might also build in some
movement, making it pulse and breathe, and add sound to enhance the nightmare quality
and the overall effect of the specter of Christmas Future.
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is the vortex part of the nightmare sequence?
Yes, the vortex is a painted drop, on which the lighting designer will project a sort of spinning gobo [a thin patterned metal disk placed in a spotlight and projected onto the stage,
creating shadow effects], so that the audience’s point of view will become somewhat disoriented. The storm and the lightning effects in the nightmare sequence will reach their
greatest height, and there’s a scenic net of gravestones that match the gravestones on the
ground. They will become animated, and the lights will start to strobe, so that it looks like
they’re flying through the air. The overall effect is of vertigo and disorientation. Scrooge
then turns around and sees that his headstone, marked “rip, Ebenezer Scrooge,” is actually his bed. His headboard has become a headstone, and, seeing his name, he collapses in
horror and falls into the grave. Then immediately the stage goes into full transformation
and he realizes he is actually in his bed, and he wakes up and it is the next day. It is
Christmas morning.
That transition happens very quickly. We have about 20 seconds to set up the town and
restore everything onstage for the last scene of the play. What is going on backstage is quite
complex. The [backstage] crew will never stop, not even during intermission. Once they
begin, it will be like choreography for the four people who are operating the show. They
will be more active than any of the actors, except for maybe Scrooge himself. And it is
really going to be up to them, with brutal consistency, to make the show happen every
night. The writing is even timed to the scene changes.
carey has talked about how the designers have been very much a
part of the collaboration process in developing the text, which
is unusual. how has this worked in terms of your design process?
The conceptualizing and the writing and the scene design all happen on a parallel track,
and I think they informed each other since I was designing the set from the outline, before
the script was written. So once the real script writing process began, Carey made some
changes [based on the scenic needs], and you rarely get to do that. Usually there is no time
and there is no money. Not that there was much time or money to do this! [laugh] I mean,
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I’ve never worked as fast on a design that is this thought out. I’m reluctant to say “complex,” because I like to think in the end that it has an economy and a simplicity and an
elegance to it, so you won’t realize how much is going on. It will be like a dream.
beaver bauer, costume designer
with A.C.T. Costume Shop Assistant Manager Joan Raymond
preparing the costumes for this production has been an intense,
time-consuming process, from sketching the initial designs to
shopping for fabric . . .
beaver bauer: We went to New York and Los Angeles just to shop for exactly what we
needed for Carol, and we’ve been to every store here [in San Francisco], and we’ve ordered
a lot through the mail.
joan raymond: We went to New York in July. Shopping for A Christmas Carol in July in
New York during a heat wave and a thunderstorm!
bb: I wouldn’t have considered doing a show this complex at another theater, in part
because A.C.T. is a unique place where you know you can make a bold creative choice in a
rendering and then have a ghost of a chance that what you are envisioning can actually be
achieved. There is enough depth [of talent and experience] in the costume shop to paint
fabric and create a hat from scratch and really take something all the way from the ground
up—from just fabric. We’re even painting fabric for [the Ghost of Christmas Present].
how does the design process evolve for something like christmas
present ’s costume? does it begin with a conversation with
[director] carey [perloff ]?
bb: I think Carey first called me in January or February [2005], and by March I was sketching. I don’t feel quite as verbally dexterous as some designers, and I feel more comfortable
with my pencil. It’s easier for me to go home and just start drawing. I convert ideas best
that way. I feel better with my pencil in my own little room. I can drive everybody crazy
because I always have 15 different versions of everything, but it’s usually something I’m trying to work through, some adjustment that seems minor but I’m trying to process something. I start casting through all these ideas and discarding and choosing and sometimes
going back to the original idea. It can be a circuitous and complicated process.
One of the first things we did after reading [Dickens’s] book was reflect on the fact that
the spirits [of Christmas Past, Present, and Future] don’t really have a gender. They really
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are spirits, in a way more than ghosts, and that interested me. My first thought [for
Christmas Present] was that I was interested in the power of the color green as a life force,
as a metaphor for the present tense—especially because it seems like Scrooge is so disconnected from his present life and from his environment that he is walking in almost a parallel universe. I thought that it would be great, in contrast, to have something really, really
vital. In the book, Christmas Present is described as someone, either a man or a woman,
wearing a green robe, and it brought to mind for me something more organic and more,
not necessarily Druidic, but something with a powerful force of life and nature running
through it.
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so, you did a sketch from that first conversation after reading
the novella . . .
bb: Yes, and then we looked at that sketch and at the show as a whole to begin to figure
out where we were in terms of the budget [laughter]. In terms of priorities, we knew that
we had earmarked a fair amount for the ghosts, that they were something we weren’t going
to stint on; we knew they were significant characters and would carry a lot of visual impact
in the show. And then I think we started talking about what the fabric was going to be.
We considered all the options of possible color and texture, and then we set out to find the
fabric. We knew we wanted green velvet, with red veins running through it, and we hoped
we could buy that fabric.
jr: We couldn’t find it! It might be in Milan, but it was definitely not in New York or
Los Angeles.
bb: So then we decided to buy white fabric and dye it ourselves, and to create the veins
in the fabric by using a caustic chemical to burn the velvet away. At that point, we started
creating samples, because you never know how the fabric is going to behave with the dye,
to figure out which is most effective. Then we had to decide what to line it with. There are
an unbelievable number of considerations, in terms of creating the shape of the fabric, creating wearability, and creating the overall impression of what a costume should look like.
what state is a costume in when an actor is finally being fitted?
jr: There are three [fittings] for each costume that we build in the shop. The first is the
muslin fitting, where [Costume Shop Manager] David [Draper] will drape a muslin pattern, based on Beaver’s drawings, on a form in the shapes she has talked about. They’ll
often have a conversation with the pattern on the form to change a line, even before we
put it on a person. And then we have a second muslin fitting with the actor, with actual
muslin stitched into the shape of the costume. At that point we’re still working in broad
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strokes, even though in that fitting we’ll start to fine tune where the detail comes in. Our
first hand then takes the pattern and makes sure that any patterns [in the fabric] are
matching and aligned, so if there is a floral pattern, for example, the flowers match up. You
could place a floral somewhere that makes it look like a polka dot, or you could place it
where it hits at a lovely place on the body. If there is a stripe with a blue and a grey and a
white, maybe putting the strongest color of stripe in a certain place will guide your eye to
flatter the body even more. It’s an unbelievably detailed and precise process. Then the pattern goes back to the drawing board, and all of the alterations to the muslin get translated
into paper patterns again, and then those get cut out of the real fabric, which is then
stitched into the real shape. Finally, we do a fitting with the fabric [on the actor]. Then we
may not see the actor again until we get to the theater.
bb: Honestly, I am really dependent on Joan and David for the finer points in fitting. I
think I have a good perception of silhouette and what I want, but they have a finer eye
sometimes for things like where the sleeve starts, how it hangs, where we’re going to put
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Costume shop accessories artisan Jane Boggess working on the most labor-intensive
costume in A Christmas Carol: the robe for the Ghost of Christmas Present. Boggess
and others in the costume department spent more than eight weeks at work on the fabric for this one garment, which underwent a six-step coloring process: 50 yards of white
velvet were dyed green; etched with chemicals to burn vinelike designs in the fabric;
painted gold; painted red (the step shown in the photo); rolled in paper and steamed to
set the dye; then the background was painted green, rinsed, and dried. Finally, the velvet robe was cut from the fabric and fitted to the actor.
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the waistline. Any of those things can totally alter your perception of the costume and the
way that person moves. It’s really a delicate dance, especially with the performer standing
there, with all of their own particular issues about their body and their character.
jr: Some of it is menswear, which is where the tailor comes in. On this show specifically, we have six different outside contractors building costumes, as well as us here in the
shop. There is also the communication between our team and when they come in to fit
things, that throws another spin on the dressing room dance.
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then you get to the theater and you're in technical rehearsals.
presumably all the costumes are finished, right? [ L A U G H T ER ]
bb: There is this whole other series of events that takes place then: the making of the list
of the costumes, and what gets worn with what, by whom and in what order, and where
the pieces will be placed backstage, and which actor goes to which dressing room, and who
in wardrobe goes to what part of the stage to make sure that the actors make their changes
on time.
jr: I make the dressing lists
and get them to wardrobe.
Wardrobe figures it out with
stage management, depending on
where the actors’ entrances will
be, where the quick change
booths will go, how many
wardrobe people they’ve got,
where the wig people will be, and
so on. And they all gave to get
out of the stage crew’s way,
because they’re all scrambling,
too.
bb: It’s a whole other dance
that is never seen.
jr: It takes me about six hours
to make the first pass through the
dressing list. And that’s without
specific descriptions. For example, at that point I just write
The Ghost of Christmas Present
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down “overcoat,” but not “the black overcoat [made out of the fabric] with the white windowpane and the dot in the center,” or “the grey one that looks like a 1950s swing coat.”
That will come later.
bb: In most cases, [tech rehearsals] are the first time we see a wig and costume together.
and at what point do you coordinate with the set design? the
colors have to complement, right?
bb: I forget when, exactly, but [scenic designer] John [Arnone] came out to San Francisco
with reams of information. And I had sketches I had already shown to [director] Carey
[Perloff ]. I think Sparky [lighting designer Nancy Schertler] came in a day later. We had
a five- or six-hour meeting where we all just started talking and playing with things, and
then we met again the next day after we all had time to weigh what each other had said.
So there were some fairly good strokes, and when we got to New York we finally had a
decent set of sketches. John, luckily, is a fairly collaborative person by nature, so he wanted
to see what we were putting forth, rather than issuing a dictum himself. Some designers
operate that way. There are lighting designers who don’t even want to look at the [fabric]
swatches, you know? Which is shocking. How can it not matter? Especially if you have
party dresses. Who do we want to come forward, who do we want to recede? What kind
of light are Scrooge and Dilber walking through? Is it so dark that we’re going to lose
them? Do we need to put light colors near their faces so at least we can find them? All
those things are important.
jr: That’s why Carey put together a team this time that really is collaborative.
bb: And it’s all done with humor, usually. Because it’s such a stressful process, having a
couple of jokes on the side, or even in the main, really helps carry one through it. There
are so many things that when you look at a costume you just don’t know how many people’s hands it has passed through. Their energy and thought and time and love have been
put into it. I don’t think anyone can ever begin to know.
jr: It would be great to know how many hours went into Christmas Present’s costume.
bb: I would imagine that [a.c.t. Accessories Artisan] Jane [Boggess] had to spend well
over 80 hours, don’t you think?
jr: Oh, I think it’s going to be way more than that.
bb: And then someone will look at it and think, Oh, they probably bought that at
Britex, or something. But it takes 120 hours, or whatever it is, to make the fabric—and
that’s before it is sewn, before the collar is made, before the cuffs are made, before the drape
with the feathers and the train and the wig . . .
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val caniparoli, choreographer
how does this process feel different to you from the work you
typically do with a dance company?
It’s been much more of a collaborative process, particularly in the workshop, with the performers and the students. It’s struck me as very different from the dance world. For one
thing, dancers’ careers are brief, so the intensity level is much higher in a room with
dancers, which leads to a very different way of working. There is a kind of urgency to
everything, this feeling that “I have to do this now. If I don’t get that part now, I’ll never
get it, and I have to get that part. I can’t wait until I’m 50 or 60.” So there’s a sense of immediacy. Working on [A Christmas Carol] has been intense, but in a very different way.
were you involved pretty early in the process?
Yes, from the very beginning, since the initial workshops. I came in once there was already
a draft script. It’s been great watching the piece evolve musically with [composer] Karl
[Lundeberg]. It’s wonderful working with a composer who is right there. It is a luxury.
have you worked in theater much, as opposed to ballet?
I started mostly in theater and music, at Washington State. So I have that background, but
I haven’t really done that in 32 years.
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how are you approaching the process differently, given that you
are working largely with nondancers?
I don’t treat it that much differently. Even in the dance world, I see what’s in the room and
we work together at making something happen. I’m more collaborative than many choreographers. Maybe that’s because of my theater background, or something. So it’s not so far
removed from what I do already, but it’s just on a different plane.
do you work with thematic concepts in your mind? does that
inform or change your approach? for example, the word “reclamation” comes up a lot in conversations with carey about scrooge.
I like her words [laugh], but I use them as a point of departure. This is similar to what I
do when I work with opera, because I work with a director there, too. I like to hear what
everyone has to say. I’m not a talker, but I like to listen and let everything sink in. Then I
adapt it and see what I can do to offer more.
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Mr. Fezziwig’s Ball, from A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens, 1843; engraving by John Leech
/ Victoria & Albert Museum, London / The Bridgeman Art Library
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Illustration of Charles Dickens and his characters © Bettmann/Corbis.
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a CAROL philosophy
by paul walsh
or more than a century and a half, ever since it was first published in December 1843,
Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol has thrilled audiences with its story of reclamation and transformation. In fact, it is the second most popular Christmas tale ever told. The
first, of course, is the story of the miraculous birth in Bethlehem, told in the Gospel of Saint
Luke, with a manger and shepherds and a magical star. Dickens’s story is decidedly urban,
with its cynical sense of the poverty and greed of the city, but it has its magic, too, and a
glorious rebirth as the spirit of Christmas enters the heart of Scrooge, transforming him
from miserly curmudgeon into a generous and joyful member of the Christmas community.
It is a beloved story, this Christmas Carol, and it is a story that was written to be retold,
charming and edifying generations of audiences as few other stories in literature have.
In 1843, the 31-year-old Charles Dickens was already well known as the genial author of such
serialized installment successes as The Pickwick Papers, Sketches by Boz, Oliver Twist, Nicholas
Nickelby, and The Old Curiosity Shop. Recognized as a writer of prodigious talent and invention,
he was a celebrity and a public figure known for his compassion, humor, and generosity of spirit.
When Dickens spoke, people listened. What Dickens wrote, people read. His serial novels
enjoyed enormous popularity as readers waited with bated breath for each new installment.
All that seemed to change, however, in the fall of 1843. Having recently returned from
his first trip to America, Dickens had begun writing a new serial novel, Martin Chuzzlewit,
in which he sought to display “the number and variety of humors and vices that have their
root in selfishness,” as he told his friend and early biographer John Forster. The murderous greed and hypocrisy exposed in the novel took its toll on the author’s accustomed
idealism, and readership for his serial began to fall off. What Dickens in his letters called
“the Chuzzlewit agonies” threatened to swamp the author and send him adrift in a sea of
anxious doubt and despair. Only generosity, he conjectured, can stave off the corrupting
force of wealth, but generosity itself seemed to be a thing of the past. The thought so
troubled the author that it put him in a foul humor. He felt his idealism wane and with it
his astonishing powers of imagination. He was on the verge of being unable to work.
Besides, in the face of disappointing financial returns on the serialization of the novel,
Dickens’s publishers talked of reducing his payment by 50 pounds a month, adding financial pressure to spiritual depletion. His father and brothers were pleading for loans, and his
wife, Kate, was pregnant with their fifth child.
F
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a ghost story for christmas
Depressed, upset, and in desperate need of inspiration, Dickens decided to try to squeeze
a new project between installments of Martin Chuzzlewit. And so, early in November, he
set to work on a ghost story for Christmas he had been mulling over. In little more than a
month, Dickens penned one of the most beloved and enduring holiday stories of all time,
inventing the genre of the Christmas book in the process.
He also managed to deliver his little book to the publishers in time to be ready for lastminute Christmas shoppers. Published on gilt-edged green paper and bound in red cotton
covers with a wreath of holly and ivy stamped in gold on the front, A Christmas Carol, with
illustrations by John Leech, was intended to be both a treasured gift and a family heirloom
that would be read again and again for years to come. And indeed it has been.
From its first day in the bookshops, A Christmas Carol was a wondrous success. All
6,000 copies of its first edition sold out by January, and the first foreign-language edition
appeared in France early in 1844. (It has since been translated into nearly every language.)
In fact, it was such an immediate success that within weeks of its release A Christmas Carol
had been adapted for the stage, and by February no fewer than eight different productions
were running in London theaters. Audiences of Dickens’s day loved the story. As we still
do today. We love to hear it read aloud, to see it acted out, to marvel at its magic, and to
celebrate its exuberance and abundance.
The success of A Christmas Carol was greater than even an optimist like Dickens could
have dreamed. Not only was his story an overwhelming triumph, but writing it had put its
author in the mood to celebrate Christmas with giddy abandon. “When [A Christmas
Carol] was done,” Dickens wrote to a friend with characteristic hyperbole, “I broke out like
a Madman. . . . Such dinings, such dancings, such conjurings, such blind-man’s buffings,
such theatre-goings, such kissings-out of old years and kissings-in of new ones never took
place in these parts before.” From the start he had hoped to write a story that would cut
across the social spectrum and renew faith in the power and possibilities of generosity,
imagination, and the goodwill of the community to reclaim the spirit of Christmas for
itself. And he succeeded in writing a story that not only spoke to people of all generations
and classes, but revitalized Christmas itself.
holiday of wonder
By 1843, the celebration of the Twelve Days and Christmas, a carefree winter celebration
of abundance and generosity that had been a treasured part of the English countryside in
years gone by, was all but lost in Dickens’s London. Suffering the attacks of Calvinists on
the right and Utilitarians on the left, Christmas celebrations had dwindled into pale
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reminders of their former selves. In A Christmas Carol and his subsequent Christmas
books, with their mistletoe and plum puddings and wassailing and blind man’s buffing,
Dickens transported customs of old from the countryside to the city. Christmas spirit was
enough to transform Old Fezziwig into the Lord of the Manor and Founder of the Feast,
and a few ribbons were enough to transform his warehouse into the modern equivalent of
the great room of an old country manor house, just as good will and imagination were
enough to transform the simple family dinner around the Cratchits’ humble table into a
medieval feast fit for a king. In A Christmas Carol, Dickens not only moved the hearts and
minds of his readers to think of the needs of others during the holiday season, he also succeeded in convincing his readers that a good old-fashioned Christmas was still possible,
even in the blighted urban landscape of industrial England in the mid 19th century, even
in the midst of a decade known as “the Hungry Forties.”
What marks Dickens’s story as original is in fact this nostalgic yearning for a childhood
blessed by the warmth of a country hearth and home, and for the sights and sounds and
smells and tastes of a traditional rural Christmas, replete with all the customs and practices
and games and songs and spirit associated with it. Kissing under the mistletoe was a nearly
forgotten custom in Dickens’s day. It was he who is said to have revived a practice that
dates back to the ancient Celts and their Druid holy men. But Dickens was not interested
simply in rescuing quaint customs and old-style victuals from the dusty archives of forgotten folklore. He understood that Christmas is a special time of remembering. It is a portal to a half-remembered past, both personal and communal, and all its special games and
songs and foods, particular to each household and each community, bind families together
and link them in memory to their own past. This was a holiday of wonder and abundance
capable of transcending both sanctimonious Puritan abstinence and the dispiriting singleminded utilitarianism already rampant in Dickens’s time.
To deny the pleasures of this world to oneself or others, Dickens insisted, was to deny
the beneficence of creation. To value industrialization above human industry and treat
one’s fellows as cogs in the commercial machine was to impoverish the spirit and the body
of the community that were the lifeblood of progress. To pursue profit at all costs was to
deny one’s basic humanity and jeopardize, not only one’s place in society, but the survival
of society itself. In place of such short-sighted views, Dickens proposed his “Carol philosophy”: “cheerful views, sharp anatomisation of humbug, jolly good temper . . . and a vein
of glowing, hearty, generous, mirthful, beaming reference in everything to Home, and
Fireside.” In place of business, mechanization, and utilitarianism, Dickens celebrated
imagination, family, and fellow feeling. In place of self-denial and renunciation, Dickens
celebrated abundance, hospitality, and the pleasures of life.
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Dickens’s Carol philosophy sought to rehumanize daily social life by reaching out from
hearth and family to embrace the small wonders of life that make it seem magical. It is this
that audiences for a century and a half have found so compelling about this simple ghost
story for the Christmas holidays.
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a CAROL for every age
Each age has retold Dickens’s A Christmas Carol to address its own needs, and the amiable
story has proven accommodatingly malleable. Dickens’s contemporaries rediscovered the
traditional Christmas in the heart of the modern urban city. Later Victorians, terrified by
the new science of Darwin and Spencer, read Dickens’s tale as a retelling of the original
Christmas story with Scrooge as a misguided wise man searching for the poor man’s child
who would restore a sense of order and proportion to the world. During the wars and
depressions of the 20th century, A Christmas Carol offered comfort and a sense of the
familiar values of hearth and home.
The first film version of A Christmas Carol appeared in 1908, and half a dozen silent film
versions followed in the first decades of the century. In the 1940s, cbs Radio asked
President Roosevelt to read the story for national broadcast (and in 1957, Eleanor Roosevelt
recorded her own reading). Arguably the best screen adaptation is the 1951 British film A
Christmas Carol, starring Alastair Sim; Richard Williams’s animated short film based on
the original John Leech drawings won an Academy Award in 1972. By the end of the 20th
century, holiday versions of A Christmas Carol (musical and nonmusical) graced stages
across the country, while the motifs of Dickens’s story echoed in nearly every form of popular entertainment. And now, at the start of a new century, this perennial tale offers a new
sense of hope in the power of imagination and community to reclaim its lost members,
even those as intractable as Ebenezer Scrooge.
Through all these tellings and retellings, A Christmas Carol has taken its place as a
modern myth in the consciousness of the industrial age. Scrooge, Marley, Bob Cratchit,
and Tiny Tim have grown larger than Dickens’s story, taking on a life of their own that is
greater than the sum of all the versions and adaptations, all the parodies and piracies, all
the Christmas cards and advertisements that have kept this tale and its unforgettable characters alive or tried to appropriate them for some other use. And even as the story of
Dickens’s A Christmas Carol has grown larger than itself, the spirit of generosity and magic
at its heart has continued to shine through.
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a man redeemed by memories
by michael paller (2008)
n 1843, the year that he wrote A
Christmas Carol, the world belonged
to Charles Dickens. His first book,
Sketches by Boz, had been published in
1836, and his career had been on an
upward trajectory since. Boz had been
followed by one success after another,
including The Pickwick Papers, Oliver
Twist, and Nicholas Nickleby. He married
Catherine Hogarth in 1836 and by 1839
was living with her and their four children (six more would follow) in a fine
house in the Regent’s Park section of
London with marble columns in the
dining room, rich mahogany-paneled
doors, a well-stocked library, a walled
garden, and a coach house complete
with coach and groom. Every inch the Charles Dickens, aged 18 (1830), by Janet Ross.
© Dickens House Museum, London, UK/The
dandy, he was instantly recognizable Bridgeman Art Library.
with wavy brown hair down to his shoulders. His velvet and satin waistcoats in deep greens and reds, often embroidered with
brightly colored flowers, were festooned with gold watch chains matched with gold tiepins
and rings. These were not affectations but irrefutable expressions of physical vitality and
intellectual exuberance. He was a character of his own creation, and he knew it: he nicknamed himself “The Inimitable.”
Dickens’s energy could not be held in check by writing alone. In his early years, the
books came almost unbidden; he could be found in the parlor amidst family and friends,
contributing to the lively conversation while simultaneously working on the latest installment of Oliver Twist. Games, jokes, puns, songs, laughter poured from him around the
dinner table and hearth, which he dominated with his oversized presence; after dark he
stalked London, including its worst slums, often until sunrise, working off an inexhaustible
I
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fund of excess energy and exercising keen powers of observation and memory. He struck
one, a biographer wrote, as “all fire and charm.”
Beneath the blaze thrown off by his outward life was the darkness of another one, as
vital to his work as the light. His vivacity, vigor, and high spirits were complemented by
driving ambition, restlessness, and profound dissatisfaction. Something in the darkness
had created the need for the light; the outward joy was rooted in desolation. Where the
light took the form of boundless comic energy in his work, the darkness emerged as the
melodrama of innocent people, children mostly, abandoned by parents and endangered by
the callous, greedy, and cruel.
Where did the darkness originate? In 1822, when he was ten, the family moved from the
town of Chatham to London, where the financial condition of his father, John (never
strong to begin with), went from bad to worse. Young Charles, who had a voracious
appetite for learning and reading, was taken out of school and sent to the pawn shop with
the meager family belongings. Among the first items to go was the small library they’d
brought from Chatham.
In 1824, as John Dickens’s debts mounted, Charles was put to work. For twelve hours a
day, six days a week, he pasted labels on jars of bootblacking in a creaking, rat-infested
warehouse on the Thames. Soon after, his father was sent to Marshalsea Prison for indebtedness, and, while the rest of the family went to live there with him, Charles was on his
own, living in lodgings. When not laboring at the warehouse or visiting his family in
Marshalsea, the solitary 12-year-old boy walked the city, almost always hungry. After about
five months, John Dickens was released, and Charles, over the objection of his mother,
who thought the family needed the money, was taken out of the blacking house and
returned to school. Although his time in the ramshackle house on the water was relatively
short, Dickens never got over the experience or forgave his parents for thrusting him into
a frightening, alien world where he had to survive on his own.
42
No words can express the secret agony of my soul. . . . The deep remembrance
of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless; of the shame I felt
in my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day by
day, what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in . . . was passing away
from me, never to be brought back any more; cannot be written. My whole
nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations,
that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that
I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately
back to that time in my life.
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Dickens never spoke of the episode to anyone other than his friend and biographer John
Forster. Neither his wife nor children learned of it until they read about it in Forster’s biography after Dickens’s death. For all his charm and volubility, there was in Dickens a well
of feelings he never revealed; he held this inner life close. None of the people who knew,
or thought they knew, the ebullient author of later years had any notion of the darkness he
carried inside and could not forget, but as of yet could only approach sidewise in his work
through a generalized, if sharp, sympathy for the poor.
A
number of events led to the writing of A Christmas Carol; the two most immediate
balanced the pulls in him toward light and dark. A speaking engagement in the
northwest industrial city of Manchester in the fall of 1843 took him to the Manchester
Athenaeum, a charitable organization that provided education, exercise, and culture to the
working and middle classes. As he looked down from the platform over “the bright eyes
and beaming faces” of the crowd, he spoke of his gladness that it provided outlets for body
and mind amid the clanking machinery of the city’s booming textile factories. Then,
returning to London, his walks through the city took him to several Ragged Schools.
These were free schools run by volunteers who taught the poorest of the poor. He
described the sight in a letter to his friend the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts. The
school
was held in three most wretched rooms on the first floor of a rotten house:
every plank, and timber, and brick, and lath, and piece of plaster shakes as you
walk. I have very seldom seen . . . anything so shocking as the dire neglect of
soul and body as exhibited among these children. . . . To find anything within
them—who know nothing of affection, care, love, or kindness of any sort—to
which it is possible to appeal, is, at first, like a search for the philosopher’s
stone.
Dickens was so appalled by the conditions and so inspired by the efforts of the volunteer teachers that, in addition to seeking Burdett-Coutts’s aid, he suggested to the editors
of the Edinburgh Review that he write an article about them. Almost as soon as he suggested it, however, he put the idea aside in favor of writing a book for the holiday season:
A Christmas Carol.
The story poured out of him. “[T]he little book established over him a strange mastery
that drove it on to completion before the end of November,” writes Edgar Johnson,
Dickens’s first major 20th-century biographer. Dickens himself wrote that as he worked, he
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wept and laughed, and wept again, and excited himself in a most extraordinary
manner in the composition; and thinking whereof he walked about the black
streets of London 15 and 20 miles many a night when all sober folks had gone
to bed.
44
He felt a great release when it was done. He described to a friend how he “broke out
like a madman,” and during the holidays that followed he threw himself into festivities as
he’d never done before. “Such dinings, such dancings, such conjurings, such blind-man’sbuffing, such theatre-goings, such kissings-out of old years and kissings-in of new ones
never took place in these parts before,” he wrote.
What had A Christmas Carol unlocked that caused a release of energy extraordinary
even for him? In it, Dickens didn’t use the terrible memories that had haunted him for two
decades, but he made a discovery that would, in fits and starts over the next few years, allow
him to turn them into literature for the first time. For A Christmas Carol is the story of a
man redeemed by his memories. For years, Ebenezer Scrooge had either blocked them out
or chased them away, and as a result, could not live as a whole person. He worked, he ate,
he slept, and rarely if ever raised his eyes above his ledger to see the hunger and need or
the happiness of the people around him. The story tells us, among other things, that a man
like Scrooge cannot live fully in the light of the present until he comes face to face with
the darkness of his past. This is exactly what he does. As Scrooge watches his painful childhood and youth, he remembers, too, the happier times he has also forgotten. The pain of
the lonely young Ebenezer is assuaged by the love of a sister; a boy abandoned by his father
finds comfort and love in a family of Fezziwigs. “Do You
Remember?” asks a song in a.c.t..’s version, and the answer
is crucial. The man without a past has no future; in recovering his, Scrooge finds a life, a family, and a purpose.
Dickens couldn’t yet draw directly on the experiences of
his childhood for A Christmas Carol, but in it he created a
character who could face the darkness in his past and,
rather than make an orphan of it, acknowledge its value.
That opened the way to David Copperfield and Little
Dorrit, rich novels that draw on the full range of Dickens’s
life and experience, both the darkness and the light. Carol
is a great gift to the world, and it was to Dickens, as well.
LEFT Fezziwig Party Girl
OPPOSITE Turkish Fig and French Plum
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an excerpt from A CHRISTMAS CAROL
by charles dickens
T
he poulterers’ shops were still half open, and the fruiterers’ were radiant in their glory.
There were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats
of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their
apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish onions,
shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking from their shelves
in wanton shyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up
mistletoe. There were pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were
bunches of grapes, made in the shopkeepers’ benevolence, to dangle from conspicuous
hooks that people’s mouths might water gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts,
mossy and brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks amongst the woods, and
pleasant shufflings ankle deep through withered leaves; there were Norfolk Biffins [darkskinned apples], squab and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and,
in the great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be
carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner. The very gold and silver fish, set forth
among these choice fruits in a bowl, though members of a dull and stagnant-blooded race,
appeared to know that there was something going on; and, to a fish, went gasping round
and round their little world in slow and passionless excitement.
The Grocers’! oh the
Grocers’! nearly closed, with
perhaps two shutters down, or
one; but through those gaps
such glimpses! It was not alone
that the scales, descending on
the counter, made a merry
sound, or that the twine and
roller parted company so briskly,
or that the canisters were rattled
up and down like juggling
tricks, or even that the blended
scents of tea and coffee were so
grateful to the nose, or even that
the raisins were so plentiful and
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Scrooge (James Carpenter, center) enjoys visions of the holiday season—including a feast of opulent fruits
who dance before him.
46
rare, the almonds so extremely white, the sticks of cinnamon so long and straight, the other
spices so delicious, the candied fruits so caked and spotted with molten sugar, as to make
the coldest lookers-on feel faint and subsequently bilious. Nor was it that the figs were
moist and pulpy, or that the French plums blushed in modest tartness from their highlydecorated boxes, or that everything was good to eat and in its Christmas dress; but the customers were all so hurried and so eager in the hopeful promise of the day, that they tumbled up against each other at the door, crashing their wicker baskets wildly, and left their
purchases upon the counter, and came running back to fetch them, and committed hundreds of the like mistakes, in the best humour possible; when the Grocer and his people
were so frank and fresh that the polished hearts with which they fastened their aprons
behind might have been their own, worn outside for general inspection, and for Christmas
daws to peck at if they chose.
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some noteworthy versions of A CHRISTMAS
CAROL
1843
A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a ghost story of Christmas. By Charles Dickens,
with illustrations by John Leech. Original novella.
1844
A Christmas Carol, or, Past, Present, and Future. As performed at the Theatre Royal
Adelphi, London. Dramatic adaptation by Edward Stirling. First stage adaptation.
1901
Scrooge, or, Marley’s Ghost. Silent Film. First film adaptation.
1913
Scrooge. Film adaptation starring Seymour Hicks.
1921
A Christmas Carol. Suite for piano in two parts by Alex Rowley.
1928
“A Christmas Carol”: The Story of a Sale. With marginal notes for a salesman.
1930
A Christmas Carol. Marionette play.
1947
Men of Goodwill: Variations on “A Christmas Carol” for Orchestra. By Benjamin
Britten.
1951
Scrooge. Feature film starring Alastair Sim.
1956
The Stingiest Man in Town. Television musical starring Basil Rathbone.
1962
Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol. Starring animated character Mr. Magoo.
1967
“A Christmas Carol.” Smothers Brothers television parody.
1973
A Christmas Carol. Mime version by Marcel Marceau.
1975
The Passions of Carol. Pornographic film.
1976
A Christmas Carol. Dramatic adaptation by Dennis Powers and Laird Williamson.
Premieres at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, directed by
Williamson and featuring William Paterson as Scrooge.
1979
A Christmas Carol. Illustrated by puppets.
1979
Skinflint: A Country Christmas Carol. Transports Dickens’s Victorian London
setting to present-day Tennessee. Features country singers Hoyt Axton as
Scrooge and Barbara Mandrell as Belle.
1980
Bah, Humbug. Episode of television series “wkrp in Cincinnati.” Mr. Carlson,
Scrooge-like, plans to give the station employees no Christmas bonuses until he
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eats one of Johnny Fever’s brownies and the dream induces visitations by the
Christmas spirits.
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1981
A Christmas Carol. Televised version of a.c.t.’s stage production filmed by abc
Video Enterprises and broadcast on Arts Cable TV, with William Paterson
(Scrooge) Mark Murphey (Bob Cratchit), Raye Birk ( Jacob Marley), Tyson
Thomas (Tiny Tim), and Lawrence Hecht (Narrator/Ghost of Christmas
Present).
1983
“A Reggae Christmas Carol.” By Kevin Curran. The National Lampoon,
December.
1983
Mickey’s Christmas Carol. The classic Disney animated characters play the roles in
this animated retelling of the Charles Dickens masterpiece.
1985
“A Christmas Carol in Harlem.” By Tony Kisch. The National Lampoon,
December.
1986
It’s a Wonderful Job. Parody episode of the television series “Moonlighting.”
1988
Scrooged. A feature film in which a cynically selfish television executive (Bill
Murray) gets haunted by three spirits bearing lessons on Christmas Eve.
1992
The Muppet Christmas Carol.
1994
“A Flintstones Christmas Carol.” A Cartoon Network retelling of the classic
story set in the stone age.
1995
Ebbie. Made-for-television movie adaptation starring soap opera star Susan Lucci
as a ruthless property developer taught the true spirit of Christmas.
2000
A Diva’s Christmas Carol. Made-for-television movie featuring a very nasty pop
singer (Vanessa Williams) who gets a reality check from three Christmas spirits.
2009
Disney’s animated A Christmas Carol. Starring Jim Carrey.
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questions to consider
1. What is Scrooge like as a person at the beginning of A Christmas Carol? How does he
change by the end of the play? What does the actor who plays him do to show Scrooge’s
transformation?
2. How are the Ghosts of Christmases Past, Present, and Future different? What lessons
does Scrooge learn from each spirit? Is there one particular moment or event that causes
Scrooge’s change of heart? What is it?
3. Who is your favorite character in the play? Why?
4. Write a short version of this story from another character’s perspective. Pretend, for
example, that you are Belle, Mrs. Dilber, Mrs. Cratchit, or Scrooge’s nephew, Fred. How
would you explain Scrooge’s change of heart?
5. Pretend it is one year later, after the story ends. What do you think will be different
about Scrooge and his life the next Christmas? What about Bob Cratchit? Mrs. Cratchit?
Tiny Tim?
6. How do the set, costume, and lighting design show Scrooge’s transformation? What is
the mood of each scene, and how does the design help to establish that mood? How does
the music affect the mood? What other effects influence the mood of each scene, and how?
7. What theatrical devices are used in this production to show Scrooge going backward or
forward in time? How can we tell that other characters can’t see him or the ghosts?
8. Do you and your family celebrate Christmas? How? Or do you celebrate Hanukkah,
Kwanzaa, or another winter holiday or festival? How is your celebration different from the
Christmas celebrations portrayed in A Christmas Carol? How is it the same?
9. Charles Dickens says in A Christmas Carol that “the children are all angels.” What do
you think he meant by that? Do you agree? Why do you think there are so many children
in this production?
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for further information . . .
on and by charles dickens
Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens: Public Life and Private Passion. Irvington, ny: Hylas, 1991.
Axton, William. Circle of Fire: Dickens’ Vision and Style and the Popular Victorian Theatre.
Lexington, ky: University of Kentucky Press, 1966.
Bolton, Philip. Dickens Dramatized. Boston: g. k. Hall, 1987.
Carr, Jean Ferguson. “Dickens and Autobiography: A Wild Beast and His Keeper.” ELH
52, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 447–69.
The Charles Dickens Museum. http://www.dickensmuseum.com
Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York:
Facts on File, 1998.
Dickens, Charles. Sketches by Boz: Illustrative of Every-Day Life and Every-Day People.
Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Dickens-Literature.com. The Complete Works of Charles Dickens.
http://www.dickens-literature.com
Fawcett, F. Dubrez. Dickens the Dramatist. London: w. h. Allen, 1952.
Glancy, Ruth F. “Dickens and Christmas: His Framed-Tale Themes.” Nineteenth Century
Fiction 35, no. 1 ( June 1980).
Mitchell, Sally, ed. Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland Pub., 1988.
Palmer, William J. Dickens and New Historicism. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.
50
Parker, Michael St. John. Charles Dickens. London: Pitkin Pictorials, 1973.
Pool, Daniel. What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist
—The Facts of Daily Life in 19th-Century England. New York: Simon & Shuster, 1993.
Raesmaa, Ritva. Charles Dickens. http://dickens.fi/dickens.html
Schlicke, Paul, ed. Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Slater, Michael. Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2009.
Smiley, Jane. Charles Dickens. New York: Lipper/Viking, 2002.
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Tomalin, Claire. The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens. New
York: Knopf, 1991.
Woods, Leigh. “As If I Had Been Another Man: Dickens, Transformation, and an
Alternative Theatre.” Theatre Journal 40, no. 1 (March 1998): 88–100.
on
A CHRISTMAS CAROL
Carpenter, James. The Scrooge Chronicles.
http://calshakes-jimsrichardiiiblog.blogspot.com/search?q=christmas
Denver Center Theatre Company. Inside Out: A Christmas Carol.
http:// denvercenter.org/Libraries/Study_Guides/A_Christmas_Carol_2010.sflb.ashx
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. The complete text online.
http://www.stormfax.com/1dickens.htm.
_____. A Christmas Carol and Other Stories. With an introduction by John Irving. New
York: Modern Library, 1995.
Hearn, Michael Patrick, ed. The Annotated Christmas Carol: A Christmas Carol in Prose.
New York: w. w. Norton & Company Inc., 2004.
Lupu, Michael, ed. Guthrie Theater Study Guide: A Christmas Carol.
http://www.guthrietheater.org/sites/default/files/playguide_ACC.2010.pdf
Perdue, David A. David Perdue’s Charles Dickens Page: A Christmas Carol.
http://www.fidnet.com/~dap1955/dickens/carol.html
on christmas
The History Channel. The History of Christmas.
http://www.history.com/content/christmas
Fried, Natasha Tabori, and Lena Tabori, eds. The Christmas Almanac. New York: Welcome
Books, 2003.
Marling, Karal Ann. Merry Christmas! Celebrating America’s Greatest Holiday. Boston:
Harvard University Press, 2001.
Restad, Penne L. Christmas in America: A History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Santino, Jack. New Old-Fashioned Ways: Holidays and Popular Culture. Knoxville: University
of Tennessee Press, 1996.
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