There’s an abundance of treats offered by director Matthew Warchus’ staging of A Christmas Carol – like Andrea Martin dressed as a Victorian caroler mingling with the audience at …
– a feast in Act II cleverly and playfully makes its way to the threadbare Cratchit home in a delightful manner than won’t be spoiled here – thisis presented on a dreamlike, lantern-glowing set designed by Tony winner Rob Howell that relies in part on our familiarity with the tale. Long lengths of chain hang from the flies like a beaded-curtain backdrop.
Thorne and Warchus also take some liberties with the ghosts. Marley is traditional enough, but a sadly underused Andrea Martin, with a Cockney accent and pushing a baby carriage, and LaChanze, wearing shades and speaking with a Jamaican or West Indies lilt, are as fresh as a new poinsettia.Even more off the beaten Scrooge path is young Ebenezer’s youthful love for Belle , here played as the daughter of Old Fezziwig and more fully fleshed out than in mosts .
Dashiell Eaves and Erica Dorfler make for an endearing Bob and Mrs. Cratchit, both quite powerful in that killer Tiny Tim scene, and the production wins hearts with the casting of Sebastian Ortiz and Jai Ram Srinivasan , both crowd-pleasing young actors living with cerebral palsy. By the time of Scrooge’s well-played and nicely credible conversion shortly into the second act, audiences will suspect thismust have some tricks up its sleeves, if only to run out the clock, and Thorne comes up with a few scenes that only the most rigid of Dickens purists could begrudge: In one, Scrooge ties up a long-ago loose thread, and the meeting has a surprising emotional punch. So too do the newly invented eulogies spoken at Scrooge’s future funeral, all well-written and performed .
If Warchus doesn’t always stick to his Dickens, he jumps enthusiastically into the author’s joyous Christmas cheer midway through the second act, when the cast breaks the fourth wall to enlist the entire theater, audience included, in the “preparation” of a massive feast – apples and oranges roll onto the stage from the balconies in most imaginative ways, vegetables drop from above with little parachutes, snow blows and the performers turn into bell-ringing carolers.
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