A Christmas Carol: Charles Dickens
Now being shown at the Guthrie Theatre
The Play in a Paragraph...
To start, I think that the fact of the matter is the play gave you the necessary tools to start putting names to faces, so you get an idea of what they look like. Take Scrooge, for example, he was seemingly a pretty old guy, with lots of stress wrinkles... or mad wrinkles, it gives you that last bit of obscure detail. Another example is the skilled sound and light crew the play obviously possesses. They did an amazing job of introducing Marley and the other three ghosts plus the phantom bird thing. You would pretty much know a ghost was coming as the sound and lights went crazy, I don't know how the actors can act like that. Finally, the play had stuff the book didn't... Such as the extended parties, the music (the book couldn't do that even if they wanted to...), and the phantom bird, etc. It did leave out some obscure details, like the giant buffet that accompanied the Ghost of Christmas Present, but it didn't leave anything to daunting out.
So to sum it up, the only complaint I really have is the fact that they took way too long to go through the first stave, it took half the play, and then they went through every other staves in a hurry. Overall, I think it was a very engaging and intense production, one that taught Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge the good reasons for the season.