Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol
Reviewed by Stephen Fife
Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts
Closed
When I told theater-savvy friends that I was attending a one-man version of A Christmas Carol at the Wallis Annenberg, the most frequent response was a sigh or a shrug. Yet another Christmas Carol? When I mentioned that the performer is David Mynne, whose one-man performance of Dickens’s novel Great Expectations was highly-praised at the Wallis last year — and who is also a co-founder of the famous English theatre company Kneehigh — there was a slight uptick of interest. But still — another Christmas Carol?
In fact, it’s hard to think of a non-biblical story that has been adapted and performed more often than this story by 19th century English novelist, Charles Dickens. His 1943 novella was a huge hit from the outset, selling out its first printing in a few days. Within months there were competing stage adaptations on the West End and in the provinces, and the subsequent years have brought a veritable tidal wave of plays, films and TV versions. (My personal favorite is the 1951 English black-and-white film starring Alistair Sim.) A new miniseries, co-produced by Ridley Scott and starring Guy Pearce (as Scrooge) and Tom Hardy, is about to drop on BBC One. So the bar on originality is very high on any new production, which must answer the question: What makes it different from all the versions that have gone before?
Though it’s been touring the world for the last three years, this five-performance run is a Los Angeles premiere, David Mynne co-adapted the script with director Simon Harvey, and they have stripped away all the bells and whistles and modern embellishments that have accumulated over the years in popular entertainments like Scrooged (the 1988 film starring Bill Murray as a brazenly ambitious TV executive). Mynne, a tall, bald Englishman, is a precise and nuanced performer. His transformations from Scrooge to Jacob Marley and others are skillful and persuasive, and usually hinge on a single detail to delineate the various characters.
Despite the uplifting ending, there is a sadness at the heart of this show, a persistent disappointment with the selfishness at the root of most human activities. This feels very relevant to our tumultuous and self-centered times, something that Mynne makes explicit by having Scrooge enumerate “Obamacare” among his complaints about the unreasonable neediness of the poor. I wish there had been a bit more of these links to our own avaricious era, but that may be unreasonable on my end.
I did not see the recent Jefferson Mays one-man Christmas Carol at the Geffen, though many friends have raved about his magical presence and his split-second character transformations. This production has neither of those qualities. It is more deliberate and reminds me of a traditional English panto — a re-telling of a familiar fairy tale or fable, with Mynne providing literary descriptions, sound effects, facial exaggerations and a few props to bring us into that world.
Whether that appeals to one’s imagination in this media-saturated world is very much an individual decision. I found the show moving and heartfelt, but I also didn’t think that the stage environment at the Wallis’s Lovelace Studio did it any favors — the high ceiling and the vast emptiness surrounding Mynne made it more difficult to focus on the quiet emotions and the incremental shifts in his performance. To my mind, Mynne would benefit from a warmer space that would enable a closer relationship to his audience. As is, it’s too easy here for the mind to wander, and when that happens it’s very difficult to be drawn back into this familiar but still-mesmerizing tale for all ages.
The Lovelace Studio at the Wallis Annenberg Center, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills; Closed. https://tickets.thewallis.org/single/eventDetail.aspx?p=13548. Running time: one hour with no intermission.
