A Chicago Christmas Carol

In transplanting Dickens’ tale to the stockyards and street corners of 1908 Chicago (as portrayed in Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle”) this new musical, A Chicago Christmas Carol is an indictment of corporate America set against the background of the furious Chicago winter.

As the wind howls across the city, we see the struggle of the poor in a very visceral way. We see Scrooge not as a cranky old man, someone to be laughed at and perhaps pitied, but as a man who holds the power of life and death in his greedy hands. His final conversion is not a happy turn of events, but a necessary re-alignment of how our society should conduct itself. With the current economic situation in our country and around the world, this production makes Dickens novel even more poignant today by reminding us of our not so distant past.