Ghost town

The spirits seem lost in A Christmas Carol

by Steve Vineberg

A CHRISTMAS CAROL Adapted for the stage by Mary Duncan, Scott Steidl, and Brian T. Tivnan. Based on the story by Charles Dickens. Directed by Brian T. Tivnan. Musical direction by Kallin Johnson. Choreographed by Mary-Sarah O'Hanlon. Set designed by Alan Martin. Costumes by Rachelle Lee Vachon and Paula Ouellette. Lighting by Jeremy Goodman. With Jay Davis, Jack Celli, Reggie Tellefsen, Tina Gaffney, Joseph Finneral, Ed Gardella/Malik McMullen, and Keith Leatham-Natal. A Worcester Forum Theatre production, at Atwood Hall, Clark University, Worcester, through December 20.

The only seasonal show as frequently performed as Dickens's A Christmas Carol is The Nutcracker, and both are probably beyond criticism by now. Audiences go to them for reassurance or to complete an annual ritual. There's nothing wrong with that, but I think the last Christmas Carol that offered any surprises was the 1988 updated movie version, Scrooged, with Bill Murray as a mean-minded TV executive who comes around after a visit from some truly wild, vaudeville-style ghosts. (There have been at least four other movie versions of the material.) I'm all in favor of screening Scrooged every year alongside The Wizard of Oz or my own Christmas ritual entertainment, Meet Me in St. Louis. Otherwise, I'm just about Scrooged out.

Worcester Forum's production, directed by Brian T. Tivnan (who also did the adaptation, in collaboration with Mary Duncan and Scott Steidl), is the same kind of mixed bag as their last two summer musicals, West Side Story and Guys and Dolls, have been. It does contain some promising visual ideas, like having Marley's Ghost (Joseph Finneral) appear as a silhouette behind a scrim, and flying up Scrooge's fourposter, enclosed in curtains, when the Ghost of Christmas Past (Tina Gaffney) calls, and wheeling in the Ghost of Christmas Present (Ed Gardella and Malik McMullen alternate in this part) as a gargantuan icon on a platform. But Tivnan hasn't conquered the unfortunate space, Clark University's Atwood Hall, which has a narrow stage and poor sight lines. Moreover, these deluxe touches haven't been worked out in staging terms, so they don't get a finishing flourish. Scrooge's bed flies up and then it comes down again. The Ghost of Christmas Present is wheeled down the aisle and then wheeled back up. Marley's first couple of entrances are nifty, but when he actually comes to visit Scrooge, the chains of his own making dangling about his neck and from his arms, he walks up a staircase onto the stage as if he were a motivational speaker brought up from the audience to address a meeting.

The production lacks visual flow, and, more important, it lacks narrative flow. Tivnan's heart is in the right place, and it's hard not to admire his Forum TheatreWorks project, but he's not a gifted director of non-professional actors. He doesn't let them improvise, but he doesn't teach them how to read the text, either; not everyone on stage seems to understand what he or she is saying, so the story is hard to follow. It doesn't help that many scenes are played behind scrim and underlit so it's hard to see what's actually going on up there. Of course, we all know the story of A Christmas Carol, so there's less harm done than there would be with a less familiar piece. But this production feels woefully underrehearsed, and there's only so much leeway you can grant even community theater when it feels pulled together. (To be fair, Forum clearly went through some last-minute cast changes: the night I saw the show, Eliza Hale, who coruns the company with Tivnan, was standing in for Jennifer Guzman in a number of roles.)

The casting is non-traditional, which certainly shouldn't be a controversial choice by the end of the 20th century. What is debatable, however, is the inconsistency of the casting. If you're going to put a white actor in the role of old Ebenezer Scrooge (here it's Jay Davis), then you can't throw a black actor in the same role in one of the flashbacks. And if you're going to put a charismatic performer like Tina Gaffney in the part of the Ghost of Christmas Past, you can double-cast her as the narrator, but you can't also ask her to play Mrs. Cratchit and the Charwoman -- not, at least, without directing her to give dramatically different performances in each of these scenes. The problem with making these choices is that though they may attest to the communal feeling of the newly reconstituted Forum troupe, they compromise its professionalism. You feel you're watching a pageant, or a high-school show where everyone is encouraged to participate and give his or her best to the enterprise. You long for the pleasures of good acting, but no one gets the chance to cut loose, and even the veterans in the cast are hardly at their best; they rein themselves in and play only one or two notes. (I think Reggie Tellefsen, who plays Scrooge's irrepressible nephew Fred, gives the best performance.) Forum needs to find another way to think about community theatre.