The author, Patrick Barlow, who adapted the Tony Award winning hit The 39 Steps for the stage has now done the same for Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. His new modern existential interpretation of the Christmas classic starring Peter Bradbury as Scrooge is now an off Broadway production at the Theatre at St. Clement’s Church at 423 West 46th Street through January 4.
Directed by Joe Calarco, set as always in Dickensian England, four other actors surround Scrooge and play the other characters. They sing carols in a menacing way almost as if they were the witches who taunt Macbeth. Tiny Tim is portrayed by a scary Pinocchio-like puppet. A shop sign reads ‘Scrooge and Marley;’ and it is the dead Marley who must haunt the terrified Scrooge.
This Christmas Carol, almost a monologue, portrays the main character as a screaming hysterical madman; and this Ebenezer might have stepped right out of Kierkegaard’s philosophical tome Fear and Trembling – The Sickness unto Death. Definitely this is not a show for the kiddies; but it just might fit the times we live in with our incoming mayor De Blasio declaiming that New York has now become a rich and poor ‘Tale of Two Cities’ just as in Dickens’ time. You may want to check this one out.
