Each year The Dallas Theater Center stages A Christmas Carol, the familiar story by Charles Dickens, with a particular spin. A unique interpretation. This year the radio stations started playing Christmas music two weeks before Thanksgiving. For that same reason, I have a theory to explain some of DTC’s choices this year. As some of you may have noticed, our country has been beleaguered and besieged by intense, divisive politics for awhile now, and (if I may be so bold) it’s kinda knocked the mickey out of us. Our famished spirits yearn and ache for Yuletide encouragement, and DTC has come to the rescue, with this year’s version of Ebeneezer Scrooge’s personal journey to enlightenment.
For those unacquainted, A Christmas Carol is Dickens’ story of the angry, hostile miser, Ebeneezer Scrooge, a Money Lender who employs Bob Cratchit, his longsuffering and patient assistant. Inexplicably, Scrooge has nothing but contempt for Christmas, dismissing it as a day he must pay his staff for no work. Climbing into bed with his cost-effective bowl of gruel, he wakes to find the ghost of Marley, his deceased partner, wearing chains. Marley wanders the earth as penance for money grubbing when he might have been alleviating the suffering of the indigent. Scrooge is visited by the ghosts of Christmas future and Christmas present as well, where the deep rooted motives for his deplorable behavior are revealed. Graced with a newfound appreciation for the humanity he once forfeited, he embraces contrition and generosity.
The Dallas Theater Center’s production begins bleakly, set in a sprawling, grotesque Industrial Revolution sweatshop, run by destitute men, women and children. The familiar exposition in which Scrooge shares gasp-worthy, unconscionable opinions such as: “Are there no prisons…workhouses?…If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”, comes in due course, and quickly. They insert generous helpings of carols, hymns and ballads. The songs are vivid with jovial merriment and rollicking dances. The famous scene in which Scrooge confronts the gravestone of Tiny Tim is replaced by a funeral for the youngest lad of the Cratchit Family. The celebratory scenes are genuinely good-hearted and giddy, the bathos, restrained, and Scrooge’s anger, mostly petulant and short-lived.
Any show we see, no matter the content, is shaped by artistic vision, and it seems appropriate that DTC would emphasize the misery of those who must struggle, considering the social upheaval that has plagued our politics for so long. The allegory is unmistakable, combined with an earnest attempt to articulate the brimming warmth and jubilation that once made Christmas a reliable respite, instead of a litany of errands and chores. The proper balance of emotions, coupled with conscientious consideration of take-away are not always easy to gauge. We make an event of theatre, because we trust it to understand the exhilaration of extremes. But that being said, the joyful tears and effervescence was welcome and redemptive.
The Dallas Theater Center presents: A Christmas Carol, playing November 21st-December 30th, 2018. Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre. 2400 Flora Street, Dallas, Texas 75201. 214-880-0202. http://www.DallasTheaterCenter.org.