Well, that was a journey.
In Act 1, I admired the performances but was so uninterested in the storytelling that I wrote in my notebook, “Why am I here?” But, by the emotional climax of Act 2, tears were streaming down my face and, when they stopped, I felt cleansed. What changed? Was I transformed, like Scrooge? I don’t think that’s it.
Part of the explanation is that, in its first act, this adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol betrays crucial elements of its source material. A Christmas Carol is about economic inequity, capitalist cruelty. It makes sense, then, that this version is set in a Tennessee coalmining town in 1936, but, for a long time, this choice feels more decorative than hard-hitting. Sure, Scrooge is mean to his clerk, Bob Cratchit, but Bob is understanding. Poverty is mentioned, but the townsfolk are so busy being sentimentally picturesque — singing the admittedly pretty “Appalachian Snow”, for instance, and generally yeehawing it up — that poverty is never truly seen or felt in Act 1.
A Christmas Carol is also — fundamentally — a ghost story: Scrooge, the uber-capitalist, needs to be scared to death before he sees the error of his ways. But, in the first act, this Smoky Mountain version of A Christmas Carol ignores this darkness, too. Nothing is even remotely scary.
As Dickens tells it, the ghost of Jacob Marley, Scrooge’s old business partner, is a terrifying figure who arrives wearing yards and yards of heavy chains, punishment — torture, really — for his failure to care for his fellow human beings while alive. The threat is that Scrooge could end up like Marley, agonized for eternity. But, in this retelling, Marley is a surprisingly young, spritely, and unencumbered Irish song-and-dance man. Sure, he’s got a couple of chains on his wrists, but they’re more like bangles, really. If Scrooge were to end up like the Smoky Mountain Marley, he wouldn’t be tormented, he’d get an agent.
There’s also a big ol’ structural problem: Too often, instead of advancing the story or revealing the characters’ inner lives, Dolly Parton’s songs simply provide ambience. They’re musical breaks. So we get song, story, song, story, song, story. There’s very little momentum.
Still, there are pleasures to be had, even in Act 1. Even though the character itself is goofy, actor Charlie Gallant does a great job of inhabiting the newly imagined Marley — Gallant is so physically precise, and he brings an Astaire-like lightness. I also loved Madeleine Suddaby’s take on the Ghost of Christmas Past: she’s so giddily unpredictable that the moment she arrived I became more engaged.
Under Ken Cormier’s musical direction, the six-piece onstage band and the cast sound great. Chelsea Rose’s lead vocals on “Appalachian Snowfall” stand out.
Still, I didn’t really get into the groove until Act 2, which is when things get a lot more serious. The ghosts are scarier for one thing. Andrew Wheeler’s Ghost of Christmas Past is a kind of zombie coalminer — with jerky physicality and a short fuse. In an effective convention, the hooded Ghost of Christmas Future is played — wordlessly, musically — by fiddler Kathleen Nisbet. And Dickens’s figures of Ignorance and Want, which are often presented as scary abstractions, are presented here in the body of a local boy from the town, who may die this winter in his tarpaper shack. It’s Act 2’s concentration on our responsibility to children, especially as they are embodied by Tiny Tim, that got the tears flowing. In character, Gallant, who plays Cratchit as well as Marley, reacts with such deep and recognizable grief to his son’s death — in the vision shown to Scrooge by Christmas Future — that it broke my heart.
The night I attended, Elena Banares made a clear-voiced and charmingly confident Tim. (She alternates with Nora Cowan.)
And I’ve got to mention Scott Bellis’s Scrooge. Scrooge’s sudden ecstasy at the end of the story is hard to pull off, but Bellis does a masterful job with it. He starts with meaningful despair at the vision of Tim’s death, which allows him to rocket into joy when Scrooge realizes that Tim needn’t die if the old miser changes his ways.
I appreciate the emotional depth achieved in Act 2 and the organic pace established throughout by director Stephen Dover.
Parjad Sharifi dramatically lights Shizuka Kai’s woody, minimalist set, and the excellent costumes are by Carmen Alatorre. I particularly enjoyed Christmas Past’s train conductor’s outfit: entirely suitable for traveling through time.
I can’t honestly recommend the whole show, but I can heartily recommend where it lands.
DOLLY PARTON’S SMOKY MOUNTAIN CHRISTMAS CAROL Adapted by David H. Bell, Paul T. Couch, and Curt Wollan, book by David H. Bell, music and lyrics by Dolly Parton, based on A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. An Arts Club Theatre production directed by Stephen Drover, running at the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage until December 24. Tickets and information
PHOTO CREDIT: (Photo of Madeleine Suddaby and Scott Bellis by Moonrider Productions. Lighting design by Parjad Sharifi.)
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