Choice Carols Trinity doubles its Christmas pleasure BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	A Christmas Carol By Charles Dickens, adapted by Adrian Hall and Richard Cumming, with original music by Richard Cumming. Directed by Mark Sutch. At Trinity Repertory Company through December 26.

Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol isn’t about clinking coins and getting away with avarice, it’s about redemption. Otherwise, Trinity seats would be filled with investment bankers instead of parents with children in tow.

As rarely before, this year Trinity Repertory Company has captured that joyful payoff, put it in a box, and handed it to us with a flourish. Director Mark Sutch has given permission to the two Scrooges in the alternating companies — Cynthia Strickland in the Ivy cast, Stephen Berenson in the Holly — to go all-out for giddy innocence at the end.

This holiday treat is taken seriously by Sutch, having been his first directing foray on the Trinity main stage two seasons ago. His Carol that year had the offices of Scrooge & Marley represent the cold-hearted Industrial Revolution in microcosm, with steel-plate rivets, heavy chains, and turnbuckles dwarfing hunched Victorian workers in Beowulf Boritt’s striking set design. This year the money-maddened duo head Scrooge & Marley Bank & Loan Co., and Boritt has the upstairs theater aflutter with advertising banners touting it as "The Working Man’s Friend!"

A double-sized safe in the institutional marble floor has two dials — why trust when you can take precautions? — and serves variously as a coffin early on and the glowing gates of Hell later. As the story begins, the two gruff partners are snatching money and personal possessions from their customers as the cast sings, combining the solemn "Dies Irae" with the Hall-Cumming lament about Ebenezer as, in Dickens’s words, a "pinching, grasping . . . covetous and mean old man."

Or "old hag," in the equal-opportunity version. I saw Berenson’s Scrooge first and by the end thought that his take was definitive. It captured the playful, childlike rapture that Alastair Sim in the 1951 movie has taught all subsequent, attentive Scrooges to go for. Berenson’s approach is to make the initial Ebenezer the sort of snarling, lip-curling curmudgeon we would love to hiss at, to maximize the eventual contrast.

That works, if you can get over the hyperbole. But Strickland does something even more interesting. She builds the outcome right into the early characterization. Her Scrooge is a smug scalawag who gets a kick out of being a grouch, who probably wonders why more people don’t indulge in the satisfaction. When her nephew Fred visits her office to wish her well, she’s expansively derisive of his good cheer, as though to match his ebullient energy with her blazing cynicism. So by the end, her Scrooge is sprawled in amazement at her prospective grave, in wonder over getting a second chance. Interestingly, Berenson’s Scrooge is on his knees at that point (which nicely coincides with a line in "O Holy Night" that a choir is singing), which better fits his more repentant characterization. He has shrunk from the touch of nephew Fred, while his female counterpart would have whapped his hand away.

But A Christmas Carol is more than a scowling grinch. Scrooge’s clerk Bob Cratchit also helps fill out the mood, beset by a boss who would begrudge him a lump of coal to warm the office, putting on a brave front before his children while mourning the death of Tiny Tim in Scrooge’s vision of the likely future. Dan Welch, in the Holly cast, makes that latter balancing act moving. In Ivy, Algernon D’Ammassa also adds lots of inventive stage business that fills out the poor man’s hesitancies, looking down and slapping his forehead in a mute "Of course!" gesture when Scrooge hands him a sheet of ledger paper.

The Mrs. Partlet (Sarah Martini) of the conventional version becomes a Mr. Partlet (Mark Peckham) in the other. On Christmas morning, when a cheerily out-of-character Scrooge presses money into Partlet’s hands, it is a dull director who passes up the opportunity to imply a sexual overture and an uninspired actor who doesn’t warm to the task. So Martini is properly flustered, and Peckham, as he stretches out on her bed and asks "What’s this for?," is one big grin.

As befits a Trinity Carol that is a notch above most others in exuberance, audiences are recruited a couple of times toward the end to join in on Christmas songs — "Jingle Bells" and such, in deference to our non-Christian company. Don’t worry. The occasions are mercifully brief — this does not turn into a hootenanny, just a passing acknowledgment that we’re all together in this time of good cheer.

Some years at Trinity, one version of A Christmas Carol stands distinctly apart from the other. This time around, both have their own delightful moments to offer. Whether you invite a kid along as an excuse or not, it would pay to catch them both.