Familiar yet revelatory, 'A Christmas Carol' triumphs

December 4, 1:14 PMChicago Theatre Review ExaminerCatey Sullivan

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   Really, how much can you expect from a 155-year-old story that’s been remade a thousand times – including as a cartoon starring Mr. MaGoo? Trotted out every year at the Goodman Theatre, “A Christmas Carol” has been called a warhorse, a chestnut and a cash cow and scoffed at as a hoary cliché dripping in sentiment.
   And sure enough, the Tom Creamer’s adaptation of Dickens’ classic is wholly lacking in the sort of avant garde meta-theatrics or deconstructionist edginess that can define this, the age of hipster irony. The production that wears its heart on its sleeve as it dares to celebrate the triumph of the human condition without a whit of sophisticate sarcasm. And for the second year running, William Brown and Larry Yando create a “Christmas Carol” that is no less than a glorious revelation.
   If doesn’t matter that you know how it ends. Brown’s direction and Yando’s extraordinary turn as Ebenezer virtually set the stage ablaze. Scrooge’s long night’s journey into Christmas day shines white hot, like a forest of Christmas trees decked out a million flickering candles. It’s enough to make you believe if not in Santa Claus, than in the joyous power of redemption.
We’ve seen Dickens’ well-worn story at the Goodman every year for the past 15 years. It’s a piece we were certain held no more surprises for us, whose lessons we somewhat smugly figured we knew inside and out, backward and forward. How delightfully wrong we were.
With no disrespect to Scrooges of Christmases past, the piece has been re-energized to the point of rebirth sine Brown and Yando first teamed up as director and star two years ago. The thing is a lightning bolt – sometimes almost literally thanks to the judiciously applied, jaw-dropping special effects, and sometimes figuratively as discovery upon discovery unfolds through the narrative.
   Brown orchestrates the production like a maestro, opening with a solitary violin played by a ragged urchin huddled in a pool of light on Scrooge’s doorstep. It’s music as a single snow flake, a thing of pure, crystalline and fleeting beauty. From there follows a crescendo of action that builds until a bustling street scene dominates the stage – chestnut sellers and char women, poulterers and children on sleds and street musicians cranking out tunes for a tuppence and then, as the merry cacophony reaches its peak, the sudden creak and slam of the undertaker’s cart and a sudden portrait of steely grimness slamming the door on all festivities. Marley was dead, to begin with.
   It’s a miniature symphony of an opening scene, and it sets the stage for all that is to follow.
   When we first meet Ebenezer, his cold, withered soul is mercilessly, monstrously apparent. He doesn’t walk so much as scuttle like crab. While his nephew Fred and the warm-hearted Cratchits radiate cheer with embracing, expansive physicality, Ebenezer is tight and small, eyes darting, boney limbs twitching with the same sort of obsessive stinginess that regulates his pocket book. That he actually seems to become larger after the final ghostly visitation is a testimony to Yando’s powers as both master illusionist and actor.
   This is, of course, a ghost story, something that Brown stresses to terrifying extremes with the spectral horror that is Jacob Marley (Anish Jethmalani). Wrapped in chains, Marley’s sudden appearance in Scrooge’s bedchamber is a scream. Thanks to some ingenious video projections and other superbly crafted trickery, Jacob provides a “gotcha” moment that’s both thrilling and truly terrifying. Brown works similar wonders with the silent, profoundly disturbing Ghost of Christmas Future. The implacable, stone-cold lack of comfort in these two supernatural beings is the stuff of eternal nightmares.
In between Marley and the Ghost of Christmas Future, of course, we get the Ghosts of Christmas Present and Past, the former played with luminous grace by Penelope Walker and the latter a spritely imp played with twinkle-toed good humor by Steve Haggard. 
   By the end of the evening, you feel like you’ve been through a transformative lifetime with Ebenezer Scrooge, an exhausting, gratifying passage from damnation to jubilation. It only seems miraculous. In truth, it’s the result of artists applying their craft to reach glorious new heights with an eminently familiar story.
 

Photos by Michael Brosilow:

Top - Larry Yando (left) as Ebenezer and Anish Jethmalani as Jacob Marley

Middle: Larry Yando (left) as Ebenezer and Steve Haggard as the Ghost of Christmas Past.

Bottom: Larry Yando (center) and the Cratchit children (from left) Caroline Hefferman,  Ryan Cowhey and Laney Kraus-Taddeo.

"A Christmas Carol” continues at the Goodman Theatre, 170 Dearborn, through Dec. 31. Tickets are $25 - $72. For more information, call 312/443.3800 or go to goodmantheatre.org. .