Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – Jack Thorne’s genuinely heartfelt A CHRISTMAS CAROL on Broadway is necessary holiday entertainment

• By drediman
• November 26, 2019
• No Comments

Campbell Scott in Jack Thorne’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” at the Lyceum Theatre. Photo by Joan Marcus.

Over the weekend, I had the chance to pay a visit to Jack Thorne’s new adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which opened last week at the Lyceum Theatre. The top-notch, ensemble-driven production arrives on the Great White Way by way of London’s Old Vic Theatre, where it premiered two years ago to great acclaim and where it seems likely to be an annual holiday-time tradition. As for Mr. Thorne, it’s been a busy couple of years. After making an unavoidably visible splash and winning a Tony Award for penning the smash hit Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the playwright made a conspicuous misstep with his follow-up (the tepid-at-best Sunday for Atlantic Theatre Company).

Happily, Mr. Thorne is back in fine form with his carefully rethought stage adaptation of A Christmas Carol. It seems he’s most comfortable when he’s working off of literary works, as was the case with his unlikely breakthrough play, the aching teenage vampire drama Let the Right One In. Mr. Thorne similarly filters the Dickens classic through a lens that’s uncannily sensitive to the ways of us humans, fleshing out Scrooge’s backstory, and thereby giving the character a more profound and accessible tragic dimension. By imbuing transparency into Scrooge’s psychological makeup, Mr. Thorne has turned A Christmas Carol into a surprisingly sympathetic characters study, in addition to conveying Dickens’ social agenda. The playwright has also managed to weave in a good number of beloved Christmas carols, which invariably warms the audience when the play starts to veer towards more chilly, existential territory.

That’s not to say that the stage adaptation is starved of holiday uplift. Indeed, the last third of the show is imbued with some of the most infectious, genuine good cheer – while avoiding cloying, synthetic sweetness – I’ve come across in a holiday show, which I would largely attribute to Matthew Warchus’s heartfelt direction. Originally staged in-the-round at the Old Vic, Mr. Warchus has effectively adapted his immersive staging for a proscenium theater, and it embraces the audience with its goodwill and communal spectacle. As Ebenezer Scrooge, Campbell Scott is an ideal fit for Mr. Thorne’s adaptation; from the get go, one can sense the humanity underneath all the gruff humbug. The cast also includes Tony-winners and Broadway favorites Andrea Martin and LaChanze, who are both pure delights in relatively minor roles, as the Ghost of Christmas Past and the Ghost of Christmas Present, respectively. Although it’s early in the holiday season, I’m hard pressed to think of a more worthwhile – no, necessary – Christmastime entertainment than this A Christmas Carol.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

A CHRISTMAS CAROL
Broadway, Play
Lyceum Theatre
2 hours (with one intermission)
Through January 5