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A Christmas Carol
Reviewed by Devin Weil
Grove Theatre Center
Through Dec. 20
RECOMMENDED
The blistering weather is palpable in director Kevin Cochran’s ever-so-faithful-to-Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol, as exuded by the whistling wind (sound by Hunter Stephenson) and billowy blankets draped across the neck and shoulders of two of the three actors who bring the eerie, comical, winter classic to an exuberant existence. Cochran serves up a traditional, powerful interpretation.
Besides the frigid air, the sound of screaming parrots outside the theater adds to the chilling quality of Charles Dickens’s story. Simply and succinctly decorated with pillars and ledges on both sides of the stage, and a raked wooden platform running from center downstage to upstage, Leonard Ogden’s set serves a multitude of functions.
At times the platform serves as Scrooge’s office and office desk, and at other times it becomes his bed and bedroom. Meanwhile the ledges and pillars represent Tiny Tim’s home and also the surrounding community. Crystalizing the coarseness of Dickens’s diction is David Darwin’s mood-wrenching lighting. Glorious shades of green, red, white, and blue cloak the stage and further emit moods of eeriness, tumultuousness, melancholy and the angelic.
Together the trio of characters embody not just three but a handful of characters – distinctive faces, voices, and actions to produce a potion of varying emotions. Sometimes seeming to jump out of his skin, Frank Simons narrates the story while quintupling as Scrooge’s clerk, Bob Cratchit; Marley’s ghost; and the Spirits of Christmas Present and Future. Simons ignites the fire within each of his characters, and lets their passions consume the stage. Similarly, Jenna Augen exemplifies her ease in and out of multiple characters, spaces and voices, sharing narrating duty with Simons, while also playing Ms. Cratchit, the Spirit of Christmas Past, and various women from the community. Completing the trio of actors is David Allen Jones’s Scrooge.
The production perfectly follows the trajectory of Dickens’s story, from the disgruntled, miserable Scrooge. In each new hour peering through the looking glass of the spirits’ enchanted spell, Scrooge discovers a paradoxical labyrinth of love and loneliness that encapsulates his life: Love from the past, his childhood and giddiness that characterized those times seems to be extinguished by his current grumbling, lonesome present, as well as his potentially dire future.
While Scrooge begins as a callous and cold man, as the narrator notes, a man whose “cold inside him froze his features” with each enlightened passage through time — past, present, and future — he discovers how his initially icy disposition does not serve him well. Holding the precious words of his business partner Marley in the forefront of his mind, “Do you know the length and strength of the coil you wear?” — along with the Spirits’ wisdom — Scrooge reclaims the warmth in his heart. For the fright of living and dying without point or praise tortures Scrooge, so that he awakens from his cantankerous and embraces an effervescent future.
This is a morality play directed mainly at cynics. No longer bellowing a carol in somber, scowling tones, Scrooge learns to sing anew. We should all be so lucky.
Grove Theater Center, 1111-B West Olive Ave., Burbank; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.; through Dec. 20. (800) 838 3006, https://www.gtc.org
