Oh, Carol!

Trinity's double dose of Dickens

by Bill Rodriguez

A CHRISTMAS CAROL. By Charles Dickens, adapted by Adrian Hall and Richard Cumming, with original music by Richard Cumming. Directed by Kevin Moriarty. With Timothy Crowe, Cynthia Strickland, Meg Quin, Dan Welch, William Damkoehler, Janice Duclos, Mark Anthony Brown, Anthony Estrella, and Fred Sullivan Jr. At Trinity Repertory Company through December 24.

All happy families may be to all appearances the same one, but Trinity Repertory Company keeps asserting that every annual staging of A Christmas Carol should make merry in its own way. This year's production, directed by Trinity Conservatory alumnus Kevin Moriarty, demonstrates that the Charles Dickens tale is multi-faceted, and not the gaudy bauble that holiday audiences often settle for elsewhere.

It certainly is joyful. Choreography by Denny Berry consists of numerous brief, varied dances -- a "skating" display, a push-broom routine conveying how merriment is contagious -- instead of the fewer, longer country dance numbers that have been known to outlast their welcome. William Lane's costumes are festive, but not as outlandishly gaudy as in some previous years, as though to help anchor the production on terra firma. Speaking of which, Michael McGarty's set certainly brings us down to earth, enclosing us in a factory with derelict corrugated walls and a belching furnace -- with real flames flaring within -- as the physical and psychological centerpiece. Jeff Crotier's lighting design throws hellish beams up through floor grates, giving smoke and overwrought faces spooky intensity.

The biggest change from the Trinity adaptation by Adrian Hall and Richard Cumming is the music. Amanda Dehnert has dispatched most of the familiar sounds, such as the "pinching, grasping, covetous and mean old man" litany of one early song. Also gone is the brooding, dirge-like "Dies Irae" that customarily establishes an important tone of doom and gloom. Gone but not entirely missing -- fulfilling much of its function is a wry substitution: gray-clad workers in the dismal Scrooge & Marley factory singing the buoyant "Carol of the Bells" while drudging to the rhythm of anvils that two of them are hammering. Chilling. This Scrooge is no solitary miser, hunched over ledger books, relatively harmless to all but his poor, browbeaten clerk Bob Cratchit. No, this guy is Donald Trump as steel-mill magnate, with a smirk on his face and all but a whip in his hand.

Showing Scrooge to be actively evil makes for quite a storytelling challenge: not only is it harder to imagine ever liking him, it's harder to convince us his eventual change is plausible.

As in recent years, the audience gets its choice of two casts, "Holly" and "Ivy." What has come to be the classic Trinity rendition of Scrooge is delivered once again by back-by-popular-demand Timothy Crowe. This time, however, his Ebenezer is no stooped and stringy-haired codger but rather a haughty businessman in elegant coin-silver vest and cravat, whose wealth justifies -- to him -- his twisted path. This Scrooge is so sure of himself that he sputters out his "Bah, humbug!" with a little laugh. Less a caricature this way, more solidly grounded and recognizable, by the time the inveterate misanthrope witnesses himself as a youth parting with his fiancée Belle (Meg Quin), he's breaking your heart.

Crowe gets good support. Dan Welch devises a sympathetic Bob Cratchit, Scrooge's clerk, without resorting to cringing. As the Ghost of Christmas Present, William Damkoehler is lustily joyful. Janice Duclos's take on Mrs. Partlet, his housekeeper, as a world-weary and suspicious menial nevertheless capable of having a tender (and hilarious) eye-contact "moment" with her transformed boss on Christmas morning.

In the "Holly" cast, Cynthia Strickland is fabulous in her first time out as Ebenezer. Starting out gimlet-eyed and self-possessed, Strickland's Scrooge loses layer after layer of armor, building to an honest and well-earned giddiness poignant for its contrast. Wonderfully modulated work.

This ensemble's rendition is rich with memorable portrayals. As the Ghost of Jacob Marley, Mark Anthony Brown delivers a writhingly athletic presentation of the old partner's anguish. Anthony Estrella as Bob Cratchit is restrained with the role's pathos, frightened but not cringing under an employer who, if offended, could hurl his family into starvation. The comic talents of Fred Sullivan Jr. are put to good use, like a theatrical version of some multi-purpose TV-ad kitchen appliance. He slices, he dices as a convivial Ghost of Christmas Present, an uxorious Mr. Fezziwig, and most hilariously a randy Mr. Partlet, misconstruing Miss Scrooge's Christmas morn generosity to delightful effect.

Director Moriarty's daring exploration of this traditional tale certainly delivers. Not every choice succeeds, of course. Retaining some of the Cumming music, the more soulful stuff, would have nicely complemented the social commentary that the grim factory implies. And when Scrooge says he'll dock Cratchit's salary for giving workers water -- instead of for putting more coal in the stove to warm up, as Dickens had it -- we're seeing an unlikely mustachio-twirling villain, who fortunately is not in view elsewhere.

But this year, Trinity's A Christmas Carol(s) certainly are treats yet again, as dense with delights as a plum pudding at Claridge's. Like old Ebenezer, this show keeps getting renewed and revitalized -- and so, magically, do we.