Westport’s ‘Christmas Carol’ Should Become An Annual Event

By Julie Stern

WESTPORT — This season Westport Country Playhouse is bringing back a reprise of last year’s A Christmas Carol, as adapted and directed by Tazewell Thompson, the theater’s artistic director and general driving force.

It makes sense that they have brought it back (and express their hope of making it an annual tradition) because it’s a pretty spectacular production that is both faithful to Dickens and musically glorious.

Against the backdrop of a cavernous two story stage done up to look like the original 19th Century barn on whose premises the theater is now located, the show is an almost continuous pageant of Victorian England, with musical accompaniment in the form of more than twenty traditional English carols, sung by the large cast of 15 adults and seven children.

Dickens, who was always sympathetic to the plight of the urban poor, was particularly concerned with the suffering of children in a time when child labor was totally unregulated, and children as young as age six toiled in factories, mines, and as servants in wealthy houses. Thompson’s understated point is that in our global world today, children are still  starving and exploited, and that we are as much in need of a wake-up call as the “good people” of Dickensian London.

The story is the familiar one that most of us have seen/read/heard before in numerous reworkings. Mean old Ebeneezer Scrooge browbeats his humble clerk, Bob Cratchit, and refuses his nephew Fred’s invitation to come for Christmas. But when he tries to go to sleep in  his solitary bed chamber, he is visited first by his dead partner, Jacob Marley, and then by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present and finally Christmas Yet To Come.

All of this makes Scrooge a changed man, as he comes to realize the brevity of life, the potential for happiness, and the finality of death. He showers kindness on everyone he has previously “humbugged” and is happier than he has ever been.

Is it possible that there can be a new and original reworking of the story? Yes, it seems so here.

Between Brian Allan Hobbs’ musical direction of Dianne Adams McDowell’s musical arrangements, and Merrily Murray-Walsh’s glorious costumes (my absolute favorite is Christianne Tiswell as Christmas Present, who first appears as the Christmas tree as the company sings “Oh Tannenbaum” and then segues into a sort of jolly red giant) the overall effect is stunning.

The chorus, which was made up of everyone in the company when they weren’t acting specific roles, was great, capturing the feel of both middle class and working class England, including a powerful procession of coal miners on a darkened stage lit only by the lights on their hats, made all the more moving by the fact that it included small boys on their way to the mines.

This is a great show for the whole family, accessible to the kids, and enjoyable for the adults.

(Performances continue until December 29. Call 203-227-4177, visit WestportPlayhouse.org or see the Enjoy calendar for performance details.)