“Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.” With those words Charles Dickens began A Christmas Carol, his legendary ghost story about the conversion of Ebenezer Scrooge from miser to philanthropist. First published in 1843, Dickens’ tale of the miserly businessman played a significant role in ensuring his writing fame. Today there’s nothing dead about A Christmas Carol: Holiday productions across America support theatrical budgets, including at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, which is opening A Christmas Carol for the 24th consecutive year.
The story of Scrooge’s night of ghostly visits that reshape his existence from a lonely, bitter man to a man that embraces the lives of those around him has become a staple of the holidays, filling theaters with families eager to be inspired by the “Christmas spirit.” The story’s roots were not so warm.
Dickens experienced the humiliations of poverty as an adolescent. In 1824 his father spent three months in the Marshalsea Debtor’s Prison. During that period, the 12-year-old Dickens was forced to move to rented lodgings, sell his books, leave school and go to work in a factory. Even when his father was released, the family’s financial circumstances necessitated that the boy continue to work. London was a place of desperate poverty, and that environment shaped Dickens’ attitudes about the plight of the poor and their children, a theme in his novels throughout his writing career.
It’s likely that Dickens’ invention of Scrooge came from his conflicted feelings about his father. When we meet the miser he is “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!” But he is deeply affected when the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet-to-Come show him the plight of others, especially the family of Bob Cratchit, Scrooge’s long-suffering clerk with four children, several of them working and one of them crippled.
Dickens wrote the story in six weeks, completing it just a week before Christmas in 1843. It sold well (the first run of 6,000 copies sold out by Christmas Eve; by May 1844 it was in its seventh edition), but due to business disagreements with his publisher, Dickens did not realize the financial return he desperately needed. Nevertheless, its continued success with readers and critics ensured that the story would become broadly familiar. Dickens performed many abbreviated public readings during his lifetime.
Soon after its publication, the novella was adapted for the stage and produced on both sides of the Atlantic, and it remains popular today in many forms. Patrick Stewart (aka Captain Picard of Star Trek: The Next Generation) has done one-man performances of an adaptation for many years. More than 20 cinematic adaptations have been made, from Mickey’s Christmas Carol and The Muppet Christmas Carol to Bill Murray’s Scrooged. Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol became a television staple in its own right in the 1960s, and other TV franchises picked up on it, from the Smurfs to Sesame Street. There are three operatic versions, several musical theater interpretations and a couple of graphic novels. The character of Scrooge certainly inspired the likes of Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch and the evil Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life. Dickens would surely be astonished — and pleased — by the evolution and expansion of Scrooge’s story.
To see a wonderful rendition of A Christmas Carol, you need look no further than our own Cincinnati Playhouse, where it will be onstage from Friday through Dec. 28. Howard Dallin’s excellent adaptation has been used since 1991. Having seen Christmas Carols in several cities, I can assure you that this is one of the best, employing many of Dickens’ words and recreating Victorian London in a spectacular physical production.
The Playhouse’s A Christmas Carol features one of the Cincinnati area’s best local actors, Bruce Cromer, as Scrooge for the 10th consecutive year; he played the humble Bob Cratchit for eight years prior to that. Michael Evan Haney directs the production for the 22nd time. He’s been part of the show since its first year, when he played Bob Cratchit for two seasons.
If you want to see how A Christmas Carol insinuates itself into other holiday tales, check out Every Christmas Story Ever Told (and Then Some!), Dec. 17-28, presented by Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, a recurring holiday treat now in its ninth season. It begins with an actor committed to doing a faithful staging of A Christmas Carol, but descends quickly into playful skewering of BHCs — “Beloved Holiday Classics.” The truth is, if it weren’t for Charles Dickens, there wouldn’t be much to skewer.
CONTACT RICK PENDER: rpender@citybeat.com
This article appears in Nov 19-25, 2014.
