Review: A Christmas Carol, Starring Michael Cerveris, Is Tight as a Drum and Pretty as a Picture

Festive fiddling. Tight-harmony wassailing. Tony-nominated actors lobbing gingerbread cookies and clementines at you.

The charm of playwright Jack Thorne and director Matthew Warchus’s analog and ultra-theatrical adaptation of A Christmas Carol knows no bounds, and that’s exactly how it’s become the wheat winnowed from the holiday chaff. It’s a staple of London’s winter season, now back at the Old Vic for its ninth year. Simultaneously, it’s making a welcome return to New York (co-directed by Thomas Caruso) for the first time, but likely not the last, since the 2019 Broadway premiere that earned five Tony Awards. (It was the truncated year of the Covid shutdown, but still, that much hardware is rare for a seasonal show.)

To see Scrooge and all his Dickensian specters this time, you’ll have to navigate the Perelman Performing Arts Center’s sterile maze of modern architecture. But your escape from the labyrinthine hallways will be rewarded with a view of set designer Rob Howell’s constellation of floating lanterns—a sight that cures hypertension and dispels all thoughts of commercial real estate.

For a ghost story about the perils of greed, that’s not a bad place to start (both Howell and lighting designer Hugh Vanstone earned Tonys). Paired with Howell’s intricate Victorian costumes and composer Christopher Nightingale’s shimmering underscoring (another Tony-winning commodity performed by wonderful musicians), the whole experience feels like breathing in a fragrant library book next to a cozy fireplace.

Top-tier performers are the ones who read to us, the X-shaped stage their hearth. We are sealed in Thorne and Wharcus’s Victorian fantasy world. But not the one where miserly moneylender Ebenezer Scrooge has his crisis of conscience; the one where the actors, using their real names, shuffle through the aisles doling out their festive pre-show snacks. It’s a subtle but effective remove that allows for broader performances and a breezy pace.

Michael Cerveris plays a classically gruff Scrooge who melts into a warm sincerity by the end of his haunted Christmas Eve. Playing the three ghosts who inspire his change of heart are Nancy Opel, a frank Ghost of Christmas Past; Crystal Lucas-Perry, a bulldozing, Caribbean Ghost of Christmas Present; and Ashlyn Maddox, our sweet Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come who appears in the form of Scrooge’s beloved sister Fan.

Maxim Chlumecky shares the stage with Maddox as a fresh-faced Young Ebenezer, but Cerveris performs most of Scrooge’s memories himself. Most affecting are the ones with his lost love, Belle, played with equal parts muscularity and softness by Julia Knitel. The device gets even richer when Scrooge, reborn, pays a visit to Belle on Christmas Day. She remains the young Belle of his memory, and it’s beautiful.

The cast of riches continues with George Abud as Scrooge’s jolly nephew Fred, Chris Hoch (a veteran of the Broadway production) doubling as Marley and Scrooge’s cruel father, Paul Whitty as the pure-hearted Fezziwig, and Rashidra Scott as a Mrs. Cratchitt who gets to show off her stunning voice thanks to this production’s musical throughline.

But of course, it’s not A Christmas Carol without that tear-jerking pair, Bob Cratchit (Dashiell Eaves, also reprising his Broadway role) and Tiny Tim (played at my performance by Micah Fay Lupin). Their parts are small, but their pathos is working overtime as the face of Dickens’s surreptitious protest of child labor conditions (in that spirit, this production is partnering with the poverty-fighting nonprofit organization River Fund). Sure, a logically argued polemic is fine. But have you ever tried gently falling fake snow and an adorable child with a handbell? Your heartstrings, and your purse strings, won’t stand a chance.