Those who attend the new version of “A Christmas Carol,” which opens at the Alliance Theatre Friday, will see a very different show than the classic that has been performed by the Alliance over the last two decades.
The new adaptation offers a deeper backstory to the world of Ebenezer Scrooge. There will be more surprises and ghostly tricks.
And the visually stunning set, by Tony-winning designer Todd Rosenthal, establishes a new standard of eye-popping entertainment.
Plans for the new version were set in motion about five years ago, when artistic director Susan V. Booth contacted David H. Bell, an Alliance alum, to see about changing things around.
At that point the Alliance Theatre had been performing a different adaptation of the Dickens classic for about 16 years. That show, also written by Bell, was due for a refresher.
“It is good and healthy for change to happen,” said Bell. “Everybody in town has seen it, and they don’t want to come back and see the same version every year.”
The Alliance has been performing “A Christmas Carol” for 32 years, and Bell has been creating adaptations of the seasonal classic for just as long. He has written six adaptations at last count, including a “Smoky Mountain Christmas Carol” on which he collaborated with Dolly Parton. Three are currently in production.
The 72-year-old is director of the music theater program at Northwestern University in Chicago, and the former associate artistic director (under Kenny Leon) of the Alliance, back in the 1990s.
When Bell wrote his first adaptation he was 35, serving as the new artistic director of Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. His concerns were striving and achieving, and he had much sympathy for the striving, achieving character of Scrooge.
Credit: Aniska Tonge
Credit: Aniska Tonge
Scrooge and his dark night of the soul are rightfully the focus of the show. What Bell has added is a more detailed look at the world around him, the people he barely sees as he strides through his day, “as solitary as an oyster.”
“We took some of the details that are in the original story,” he said, “brief details, and created from them a slightly more complex family life in the past for Scrooge.”
Director Leora Morris said other characters will also be amplified. We will see the impact of Scrooge’s impassive greed on those who can’t pay back his loans, on those who he has thrown in debtor’s prison.
At the same time, Scrooge is no villain, said Morris. We see how his reaction to childhood loneliness has caused him to “armor up,” using his wit and his skill to hold the world at a distance.
Dickens uses comedy and pathos to comment on Victorian London, with its poorhouses and its deep gulf between the poor and the rich. His story is extra meaningful to 21st-century America, said Morris, as we focus on social injustice and the wildly unequal lives of the haves, who ride their own private rockets into space, and the have-nots, who risk their lives delivering GrubHub meals.
The arc of Scrooge’s redemption, as he faces the prospect of his own unmourned death, is one of the great cathartic moments in literature. That explosive happy ending, buoyed by a chorus singing madrigals in four-part harmony, is why the story is an undying Christmas tradition, and a regular at the Alliance.
Chris Kayser played Scrooge for 16 years, retiring in 2013 and yielding the role to David de Vries, who handled it for the next six. Last year the Alliance created a radically different drive-in “Christmas Carol” to accommodate COVID-19 strictures, with Brad Raymond in the lead role in an outdoor radio play performed in stacked shipping containers.
This year, as the play returns to the Coca-Cola Stage at the refurbished Alliance, Andrew Benator takes the role of Scrooge, and Chloe Gia Bremer becomes Tiny Tim.
Even as the Alliance was mounting last year’s wild departure, carpenters, painters and electricians were working on the elaborate set for this year’s production.
The rotating set, with its soaring clock tower and M.C. Escher-esque interlocking facades, was painstakingly constructed over the last 18 months, disassembled, stored in warehouses, then re-assembled for this season’s show.
“That’s how we kept the shop employed during COVID,” said spokesperson Kathleen Covington.
Credit: Alliance Theatre
Credit: Alliance Theatre
A visit to the Alliance Theatre on a Monday found properties manager Suzanne Cooper Morris on a ladder, trying to string invisible fishing line through a hidden pulley attached to the yellow cord that rings the bell at Scrooge’s front door. “This bell has to ring itself,” said Morris.
The ghostly ringing of the bell is just one of the supernatural effects in a show where at least one creature goes airborne.
Hanging nearby was the giant puppet that serves as the Ghost of Christmas Future, its black shroud and bony fingers temporarily still.
The Alliance is sparing no expense to amp up the ghostly chills, as well as that Christmas feeling. They told set designer Rosenthal, “multiply by two.”
Rosenthal is also on the faculty at Northwestern (he is chair of stage design in the theater department), and is currently in Atlanta, tweaking the set during tech rehearsals.
Rosenthal said “I wanted this set to be this Victorian transformative toy, this whimsical carousel.” Looking at all the different faces of the three-dimensional set, Rosenthal said, “I compare it to a Swiss Army knife: it’s got a magnifying glass, tweezers, a toothpick, a pen.”
The set will be disassembled and placed in storage when the show is struck on Christmas Eve. It will be brought back next year and the year after that, amortizing the extreme cost of the beautiful design over many seasons.
As Atlanta audiences revisit the story of the miser who learned to keep Christmas best of all, Bell will be doing the same thing.
“I revisit it almost every year and have for about 40 years,” he said. “I’m always working on one version or another. It is a brilliant story, it’s my favorite story, it is the story of redemption, of second chances, which is as American as anything I could possibly imagine.”
THEATER PREVIEW
“A Christmas Carol”
Nov. 12-Dec. 24. $25-$78; children $17.50-$54. Alliance Theatre at the Woodruff Arts Center, 1280 Peachtree St. NE, Atlanta. 404-733-4600, alliancetheatre.org.
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