Born again Trinity’s Carol is a thrilling Christmas present BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	A Christmas Carol Adapted by Adrian Hall and Richard Cumming from the book by Charles Dickens. Directed by Peter Sampieri. At Trinity Repertory Company through December 27.

You may think you’ve seen Trinity Rep’s A Christmas Carol, but you have another chance to see it for the first time. I’m not talking about the new adaptation that the theater will be opening in Boston on December 9. No, director Peter Sampieri is using the standard Adrian Hall and Richard Cumming version for the 27th season, but he and the company are making it as bright and new as a sinner reborn.

It has less the brooding introspectiveness of Dies Irae and more the lighthearted gaiety of "Deck the Halls" and "Wassail," which are among the carols enthusiastically sung. This is not to say that this time around it’s superficial, just that we get more of a reminder that this is a tale told most convincingly to children. When Scrooge at the end says that he doesn’t know anything anymore, that he feels like a baby, kids know instinctively what he means, and grown-ups — if the production has hit its mark — should know in head as well as heart.

Everything converges happily to make that happen this year.

In the few minutes of pre-show activity, a playground full of children are skipping rope and tittering and wheeing on a seesaw and tire swing. (They are thin tires that would pass for dawn-of-auto artifacts rather than anachronisms.) They clear out, and in a down-spout a child finds a large coin — and we can all recall that glee. (In a marvelous stroke, that child turns out to be Ebenezer.) There are 32 kids in four casts for the two productions, more than ever before in Trinity’s Christmas treat.

The set, designed by Michael McGarty, enhances this setting as effectively as I’ve ever seen in these shows. In the large upstairs theater, the in-the-round performance space is only about a dozen feet wide, so we get much the intimacy of a smaller theater. Scrooge cranks his bedroom cubicle (and moneybox) up and down, for a bit of 19th-century high-tech paranoia. Drying laundry is overhead at one section, in front of patched brick tenement façades.

And that brings in another smart touch: instead of Scrooge & Marley being a generic money-grubbing enterprise, here it is a slum-lord partnership. Of course! When S&M stand in front and shout "Rent!" and a policeman wrests money from the tattered lot who assemble at the doors as children witness the humiliations, we know as much about the landlords as St. Peter would at the Pearly Gates.

Sampieri has made much vividly felt that has been passed over in other productions. Before Marley dies he sees his gravediggers leaning on their shovels, gleefully eager for some work; he is stripped of his clothing while still alive. Similarly, when Scrooge is facing his grave toward the end, hands clutch and grab hold, making his fear more than a feverish notion. Ghost stories were that century’s horror movies, and this ghost of Marley is a zombie, all right, with decayed flesh for a face.

On the other hand, to make this psychologically real to us, the ghosts are also made to clamber out of Scrooge’s subconscious. The red-velvet robed Ghost of Christmas Present is the neighborhood drunk who wears a faded red coat. Christmas Past is a fun-loving loved one from Scrooge’s personal history of regret. The Christmas Future composite, a blind beggar with a cawing raven-person flying around him, was too overwrought to work for me, but the spectacle sure was flashy theater.

And out of all this, oh, the redemption. Getting from Scrooge’s viciousness to sincere regret at the end is a fundamental problem with A Christmas Carol. Here the transition is aided wondrously by first one crystalline voice, then the company, singing "Amazing Grace" — which was penned by former slave trader John Newton. Between that and the anguish that Anne Scurria earlier brings to the ghost visits in the Holly cast, we’re readily convinced — and we’re especially glad for such a hard case who melts at a hug like it’s the first human touch in a lifetime. For his Ivy company Scrooge, Dan Welch is most convincing as the giddily joyful man after his change of heart.

The two casts sometimes take different tacks and turns with their characters and sometimes bring out the same traits in distinctive ways. As Scrooge’s beset clerk Bob Cratchit, Noah Brody is an emotional match for Scurria’s vulnerable Scrooge, devastated by Tiny Tim’s death, while Andy Grotelueschen presents the sturdier temperament of a man defeated by his job but resurrected each night by his family.

Director Sampieri’s hand is evident in how Scrooge’s nephew Fred unmistakably represents the unghostly spirit of Christmas, and the heart of this story, as both Stephen Thorne and Ben Steinfeld create a deeply compassionate man who won’t let a foul-tempered uncle or aunt, respectively, harden his own feelings.

There is a narrator this year, with more lines from Dickens’s text sprinkled through Trinity’s customary version — for example, referring to Scrooge’s early crotchet that the poor might as well decrease the surplus population, a ghost advises him to "forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered what the surplus is, and where it is." A blind man with a walking staff, he is played by the head of the strolling musicians and also doubles as Christmas Future. Chris Turner brings a welcome English accent as well as his harmonicas to the part, and Chris Lussier contributes a jolly presence as well as pennywhistle in the second cast.

This is a magnificent take on A Christmas Carol, and if attending isn’t an annual event for your family, this would be a good year to begin making it an occasional one.