Nov. 23--Look around your gatherings this holiday season. Chances are you'll see a blend of the familiar and familial -- past, present and future. Ornaments awkwardly crafted by the hands of children, who perhaps now have kids of their own, hung front and center on the tree. Calorie-laden feasts, preserved on faded recipe cards handed down from long-gone loved ones. Or maybe this year, at a holiday party, your eyes will land on someone you've never noticed before, and suddenly there's a chance at a joy-filled future long after the holiday finery goes back into the boxes.
Such elliptical musings are perhaps inevitable when one has seen "A Christmas Carol" at the Goodman many times. Tom Creamer's adaptation from the Charles Dickens original remains unchanged, after all. It's not as if the trajectory of Ebenezer Scrooge's journey with the spirits holds narrative surprises -- though Larry Yando makes even the bits I've seen several times feel fresh and inspired. (Every time he daintily pats his dank locks before the visit of Christmas Past, it cracks me up.)
But director Henry Wishcamper's production this year does something wise and warm. It makes us see that everyone around Scrooge has their own story to tell. Sometimes it's about loss. Sometimes it's about renewal. But always, it's about understanding that we need to treasure our time huddled together as "fellow-passengers to the grave," as Scrooge's nephew Fred so eloquently puts it.
Of course, the three ghosts plus Marley represent the ethereal guides for Scrooge. (Poor Marley! As played with howling fury and anguish by Joe Foust, one fervently wishes that Dickens had given him another shot at redemption, too.) Travis A. Knight's Adonis-like Ghost of Christmas Pecs, er, Past, is buff enough in his leather skirt and "Angels in America" wings to make one wistful about the vanished beauty of youth, and Lisa Gaye Dixon's Ghost of Christmas Present remains majestic in her magnanimity.
But Fred (Anish Jethmalani) and Bob Cratchit (Ron E. Rains) form the corporeal signposts on Scrooge's journey, and Wishcamper makes the connections between the two men, as well as their changing relationships to Scrooge, the emotional fulcrum of the production. From Fred's handing off of a small tree to Scrooge's impecunious clerk to Bob's tearful recounting of Fred's kindness in the sad post-Tiny Tim "future," we mark them as purveyors of the kind of simple charity Pre-Haunting Scrooge mocks as naive and useless.
As Scrooge's only living relative, Fred is a connection to present and future, as well as a reminder of the goodness of Scrooge's long-dead sister, Fan (Paige Collins), who fetches Young Scrooge (Aaron Lamm) home from a particularly, well, Dickensian boarding school. There is a moment late in the play, after Scrooge's transformation from emotionally stunted miser to warmhearted patriarch, where he and Fred stand silently in front of a portrait of Fan. That's about the point where I started digging for a hanky, as the realization hit that a very big part of Scrooge's past coldness has been avoiding exactly that kind of bittersweet moment of loss.
Rains and Penelope Walker's sweet-but-steely Mrs. Cratchit, as well as the winsome young Cratchits, serve as reminders of what Scrooge could have had if he'd not tossed away the love of Belle (Kristina Valada-Viars, in a lovely forthright performance). But the possibility for romantic fulfillment resides even in fleeting characters like Larry Neumann Jr.'s Chestnut Seller and Kim Schultz's Tree Seller, whose road-rage encounter in Christmas Present turns (with the help of Dixon's fairy dust) into a love match. By the time Yando's Scrooge is throwing his own Fezziwig-like holiday party, they're turning up with twins in tow.
And as Nathaniel Buescher's no-longer-crippled Tiny Tim teaches Yando's old man some fancy footwork, we see that we're all together in a lovely, stumbling, hilarious -- and sometimes unbearably painful -- dance of life that ends too soon, and should thus be all the more beloved for its brevity.
Kerry Reid is a freelance critic.
ctc-arts@tribpub.com
"A Christmas Carol" -- 3.5 stars
When: Through Dec. 27
Where: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St.
Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes
Tickets: $25-$102 at 312-443-3800 or goodmantheatre.org
