Reviews

A Christmas Carol

The Goodman takes on Dickens’ spirited story of Yuletide transformation.

Joe Foust as Marley and Larry Yando as Ebenezer Scrooge in the Goodman Theatre's A Christmas Carol.
Joe Foust as Marley and Larry Yando as Ebenezer Scrooge in the Goodman Theatre's A Christmas Carol.
(© Liz Lauren)

For the past 37 years, the Goodman Theatre has been hauling out its annual staging of A Christmas Carol, arguably the world's best-known ghost story. Charles Dickens' seasonal tale of a miser's redemption in Victorian London is the very definition of a holiday chestnut. But here's the near miraculous thing: Directed by Henry Wishcamper and starring Larry Yando, Tom Creamer's adaptation of Dickens' classic is evergreen. Instead of becoming stale, A Christmas Carol resonates with the beauty and clarity of church bells. Even if you're familiar enough with Tom Creamer's script to recite all of the dialogue yourself, the Goodman production remains revelatory.

Wishcamper, returning to direct the piece for the second consecutive season, has darkened the palette considerably. When we first meet Ebenezer Scrooge (Larry Yando takes on the role for his seventh consecutive season), he displays a heart as gnarled and withered as an ancient tree root. In Yando's bravura performance, Scrooge isn't just miserly, he's all but pathologically sinister. It's more than a little unsettling.

Of course, just about everybody in the audience knows there will be a metamorphosis in Scrooge by the time the four spirits — Jacob Marley and the Ghosts of Christmases Past, Present and Future — are done with him. What comes as a surprise is how terrifying those ghosts can be and how joyous the end result of their labors is. Wishcamper succeeds in immersing the audience in a vast depth and breadth of emotion, ranging from spine-chilling fear to unabashed jubilation.

The large ensemble cast is a treasure trove of richly realized characters. As Jacob Marley, Joe Foust is a larger-than-life ghoul worthy of a horror movie. His tormented, wailing departure from Scrooge's bedchamber to the hellish limbo where he's doomed to wander through eternity is the stuff of nightmares. As the Ghost of Christmas Past, Patrick Andrews quite literally shines, soaring in like an illuminated archangel in the mold of St. Michael the Warrior. Both actors temper their ferocity with an underpinning of sorrow. These are fearsome spirits, to be sure, but behind their eyes is a sadness at the limitless cruelty and selfishness of the mortal world. Wishcamper saves his most bloodcurdling display of spectral visitation for the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, a towering, faceless figure in black whose looming, ghastly silence will give small children nightmares and larger ones some serious motivation to straighten up and fly right.

At the heart of the story is Yando, tremendously effective as he takes Scrooge from misanthrope to philanthropist. He is also often marvelously funny, delivering a performance of pathos, humor, and great humanity. If you're not cheering for Scrooge by the time he shows up at his counting house the day after Christmas, you are a stonehearted Grinch.

The production is enriched by Todd Rosenthal's lavish and wonderfully detailed set. Scrooge's gloomy mansion is massive and eerily askew, its angles an architectural depiction of the deformed nature of its owner's heart. Keith Parham's evocative lighting design is equally powerful, whether the scene is a shadowy, midnight graveyard or a brightly festive Christmas party. A Christmas Carol is also filled with live music, from the high, lonesome a cappella of a lone urchin singing plaintively on an empty street to the lively, fiddle and piano accompaniment of a raucous holiday jig. And Heidi Sue McMath's opulent costume design completes the Victorian-era world that fills the stage.

Like the ubiquitous productions of The Nutcracker that dot the theater-sphere every season, A Christmas Carol is a holiday war-horse, but that doesn't diminish its power. The spirit of Dickens becomes a celebration in the Goodman's production, and that's something to be merry about indeed.