A tale of two Carols Trinity doubles its Dickens in Providence and Boston BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Lord knows, Trinity Repertory Company has come up with many a variation on the theme in its 27 years of reincarnating A Christmas Carol. Re-envisioning the show has been what kept an increasing number of regulars checking it out year after year, until in 1996 the company started double-teaming us with two alternating casts in 16 shows a week.

Reinvention has been key to the recurrent fun, as we kept getting new surprises in characterizations and interpretations. Back in the 1980s, a flour-white ghost of Marley howling above us as he shot across the upstairs theater on wires, Keith Jochim flapping and writhing in a cloud of powder. Three years ago, children in Scrooge’s factory trudged around a white-hot furnace, as if before the mouth of hell, under Kevin Moriarty’s canny direction.

And, just recently closed, the ultimate fresh version — an entirely new adaptation.

Boston’s Cutler Majestic Theatre resounded to a fresh adaptation of A Christmas Carol, which ended a three-week run on December 26. Trinity artistic director Oskar Eustis did the book and associate artistic director Amanda Dehnert wrote the music and lyrics. It may or may not replace the current Providence Christmas standard, though officially it’s too soon to be talking about that.

It was different, all right, from the Charles Dickens story as interpreted by Trinity’s founding artistic director, Adrian Hall, and his music director and co-writer, Richard "Dee Dee" Cumming. The traditional production, which audiences saw this season, takes its tone from the Solemn High Mass’s "Dies Irae," which is woven into early passages and dominates the dark atmosphere. That contrasts nicely with old Ebenezer eventually breaking out into the sunshine of his Christmas morning epiphany.

The Eustis/Dehnert take on the tale emphasizes — and prepares us for — the redemption, while not neglecting the darkness, but more as a threatening background. (If you really want dark, you’d have loved the lugubrious Tina Landau-written Christmas Carol that Trinity did during the 1989-90 Anne Bogart season. There the surprise at the end was that Scrooge didn’t commit suicide, Grand Guignol fashion.) This is not to say that the seriousness of Scrooge’s plight is neglected in the Boston version. Complementing the traditional carols that Dehnert aptly has dominate the Christmas Past scenes, her original music keeps the story grounded in minor-key music and lyrics that remind us, and him, that we are dealing with a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner.

There are marvelous inventions in this adaptation, which was headed by Stacy Keach as Scrooge. Director Kevin Moriarty brings back his factory setting, though this time there is a huge hand-spun wheel instead of a furnace, amid a rivet-and-girder manufacturing hell designed by Eugene Lee. Marley’s ghost, in the thrashing form of Trinity company member Timothy Crowe, is as violently tormented as was Jochim, as he rises from glowing stage smoke, suspended with his money boxes on the chain he forged link-by-link, much as Dickens described him. Trinity alumnus Jochim returns — the only other Providence company actor in the cast — as a very merry Ghost of Christmas Present. Cleverly, Eustis has an ill-destined Tiny Tim be the Ghost of Christmas Future, a follow-up to ingeniously having the boy crippled by machinery in the factory before the anguished eyes of his father, Bob Cratchit.

But perhaps the biggest difference in this production was the lighter tone set by Scrooge immediately, and problematically, to show that he is capable of his later joy. Here Scrooge has his heart thawed in a finger-snap at one of the first places the Ghost of Christmas Past takes him, to his boyhood apprenticeship at Fezziwig’s. Sometimes the psychologically plausible can make a dramatic arc flatline.

But, basically, the more things change, the more they stay the same when it comes to A Christmas Carol. As long as Tiny Tim ends up climbing onto a shoulder instead of into a grave, the Dickens classic will remain as popular as it is and uplifting for the rest of us.

Amanda Dehnert was the perfect person to re-design the music for the annual Trinity garland-bedecked cash cow. When she came to Providence to the Trinity Conservatory in 1994, the first show she worked on was A Christmas Carol, directed by Peter Gerety. Three years later, the show was her first professional directing gig. Dehnert has worked on it continually since then as music director, so she knows the score as well as anyone ever has.

"It was very daunting to step off from that and to try to live up to what I thought was a great model that Richard Cumming set out for how to think about writing the show," she says, speaking by phone from Trinity.

She had composed original music for such productions as The Cider House Rules and As You Like It, but she had never written lyrics before. Was the entire task as challenging as it seems?

"There were a lot of crumpled-up drafts," Dehnert says. "It got easier as I went on. At first the wheels felt very rusty. But I do feel like I got kind of lucky in finding what I thought was going to be my hook into the musical ideas fairly early, and then it was just working with it and working with words and trying stuff and throwing stuff out, and getting feedback from people and trying to integrate those ideas."

When it came to promoting the Boston production, Trinity may have been in competition with itself, but you wouldn’t know that from the publicity. In the Boston show’s program and ad flyer, there was no word about this being a new adaptation. So unless Bostonians happened to know that Hall and Cumming did the other production, they could be forgiven for believing that this is the show that Providence audiences have been flocking to all these years. In fact, in promoting the Boston show, instead of quoting a recent mixed review of that production in the Providence Journal, a program insert quoted a rave from that paper about a prior Rhode Island production: "Not to be missed! With energetic and masterful acting, A Christmas Carol is brimming over with good cheer!"

And what about the why of a Boston production? Was it teeth-gnashing time on Washington Street every January when royalty checks went out after Trinity’s Christmas Carol once again closed the year as a smash hit?

Eustis says that the idea for doing another adaptation had been batted about for years, but the genesis was the particular opportunity of taking the traditional Trinity production — or a fresh one — to Emerson College’s Cutler Majestic Theatre.

"The thing that finally made the difference for us is we had decided to go ahead and try it in Boston, and we began discussing what the production in Boston should be like," Eustis begins, in a separate phone interview. "And Kevin Moriarty, the director, said, ‘Well, it’s really simple — if you want this to be a production about Scrooge facing death, facing his own mortality, then I think we should do Adrian and Dee-Dee’s, because it doesn’t get any better than that. But if what we want to do is what I’ve heard you talk about so often, Oskar, if you really want to do a version that is about Scrooge’s relationship to the community, then I think you need to do a different version, because I don’t think that’s the strength of Adrian and Dee-Dee’s.’ I think he was right, and that was the moment where I went, ‘Well, let’s do it.’ "

Another factor, he says, is that the 1100-seat Boston theater has a proscenium stage and a balcony — actors stepping down into the audience would quickly be lost from balcony sight lines. The upstairs theater in Providence invites actors to run up and down the aisles, which makes for a more intimate theater experience, and the traditional adaptation was written with that in mind.

"To me, the genius of what Amanda has done is create a musical score that is incredibly compelling and takes the presentational nature of what we’re doing in Boston and makes it a huge strength," Eustis says. "My nightmare, what I was worried about, is that we’d constantly be feeling as we were creating this: ‘Oh, shit — if only we could go into the audience with this [scene]!’ "

As far as the new show being a moneymaker, Eustis says that while attendance has met projections, the Boston production is a three-year arrangement, with the major expenses coming at the beginning. He and Dehnert are deferring their royalties till later in the cycle, when Trinity’s coffers will, hopefully, begin clinking with whatever coins come cascading in.

So what is the fate of the current Providence version? Between the new adaptation being more presentational, designed for a proscenium stage, and the don’t-fix-what’s-not-broken complications of building a new fan base, isn’t the new adaptation likely to stay out of town?

"In terms of coming to Trinity, I don’t think it’s going to happen, but who knows?" Eustis says. Later he and Dehnert will sit down and make projections. "I really, really doubt that’s going to include doing the show at Trinity next year. But, again, who knows? That’s certainly not our plan at this point."