There is no definitive stage version of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, just as there is no one definitive film version. And though ACT had a faithful and well loved version of its own that it staged for over 40 years, the company decided it was time for a change.
Artistic Director Pam MacKinnon brought in friend and collaborator Craig Lucas, the playwright behind the Tony-nominated Prelude to a Kiss and the book for the Amelie musical, to take a new look at the Dickens text, and that resulted in A Whynot Christmas Carol, which opened Sunday night, with MacKinnon directing.
The play sets us up with a hefty dose of Dickens's words — from the original 1843 novella, whose full title was A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas — with longtime ACT company member Dan Hiatt in the role of Phil, the community theater actor in the town of Whynot who is playing Ebenezer Scrooge.
We are also introduced to Phil's wife Aubrei (Stacy Ross), who is directing the town's "new version" of A Christmas Carol; along with stage manager Lark (Gianna Digregorio Rivera) and her child Zayd (Piera Tamer), who seems to identify as nonbinary and gets cast as Tiny Tim. And there is Catherine Castellanos, a performer who's been introduced to the group as a dancer, who, comically, makes a whistling sound every time she says the letter 'S' — a joke that does and doesn't always work, but there is plenty of comedy in Aubrei's efforts to tweak the script to take all the S's out of Fran's lines, including changing her role from The Ghost of Christmas Past, to The Revenant of Yuletide Gone.
Lucas's script is light on exposition and character development, and we are meant, I think, to conflate each character with their role in the play-within-the-play, though this can get confusing. The dynamics of Aubrei and Phil's relationship seem to be important, though they're never made very clear. And at one point, Aubrei scolds both Phil and the actor Holts playing Cratchit (Patrick Kelly Jones) for their "miserly" behavior, Phil for complaining about too many script alterations and Holts for not being much of a team player — he's asked to step in for a small role and refuses.
There is also another nonbinary cast member, Swan (Sara Toby Moore) who notes early on that they aren't comfortable wearing padding to play female roles in the drama, and this is never further explored. This seems to be Lucas's effort to modernize the theater world in which such a production would take place today, but maybe deserves a bit more weight.
Similarly, there is a glancing reference to Scrooge being coded as Jewish in Dickens's text — something that literary historians mostly seem to disagree with, and there are several non-Jewish miser types in Dickens's novels who could be seen as precursors. And this gets extra weight, to no clear end, when Scrooge's nephew-in-law appears in a late scene of A Whynot Christmas Carol wearing a yarmulke.
We are taken headlong into the production, from tech rehearsal to opening night, with Act 2 of the play seeming as though it's going to give us a backstage perspective on what's happening onstage, as Scrooge travels around with the Ghost of Christmas Present (the hilarious, maniacal Jenny Nguyen Nelson who seems to have been directed to add a touch of Carol Kane's evil fairy version from Scrooged to her portrayal). But very quickly, with some deft direction by MacKinnon, the cast rotates back around to presenting a front-on version of the show, calling into question what purpose the backstage view was meant to serve.
An elaborate, smoke-spewing, skeletal puppet that portrays The Ghost of Christmas Future is indeed scary, and requires three people to operate, and there are some evocative moments as Scrooge is confronted with his death. A few terrific stage illusions arrive in this section as well, thanks to illusionist Skylar Fox (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child). But with so many tonal shifts and breaks in the narrative — including several literal dance breaks for the fictional cast, with original music by The Kilbanes and Alphabet Rockers — it's a bit hard for the audience to know where to land in Scrooge's wild ride.
Things seemed to go a little off the rails at Sunday's performance when the fourth wall dropped at the end of this second act, after an unexpected rendition of "Deck the Halls" by the ACT Young Conservatory, in an odd, extra-meta moment. Hiatt's character turns to the actual audience and asks, as Scrooge, "Can we not in this moment find some reason for hope?" to which someone in the audience, after an awkward silence, just said, "Nope."
It was meant to be a prompt for us to say "Why not?", though this is only loosely set up earlier in the play and didn't come naturally. It certainly called to question whether, in a political moment such as we're in in a place like San Francisco, you should expect anyone to respond any differently to that question, as we build up to Dickens's now too familiar refrain, "God bless us, every one!"
The play feels exciting, intriguing and fresh at many moments, and it feels multiple times like it's getting close to significant insights and revelations about this Christmas parable. But each time it seems to stop short, or move on too quickly. Lucas suggests in his program notes that he didn't want to present any simple tale of good and bad, generous and miserly, suggesting "we all hold... these delusional flaws of Scrooge" and "We see ourselves in him." Dickens's story, and such dramatizations of it, ask us to look at our own blessings and flaws, and to imagine ourselves as more generous, even if we worry about money sometimes, or look down on others, and face our own scarcities. But we all contain the capacity to do better. And, why not?
'A Whynot Christmas Carol' plays through December 24. Find tickets here.
