Michael Halberstam as Scrooge at Writers

By Dennis Polkow

When Charles Dickens wrote “A Christmas Carol” back in 1843, he reportedly did it merely to pay off a debt.  His “little Christmas book,” as he liked to describe it, became the first in series of six Christmas books, but none ever attained the same popularity as that first effort.  A less clever man might have been annoyed by the success of what he clearly considered a lesser work, but not Dickens.  He was enough of a populist to recognize, as Jean-Paul Sartre would later explicitly state it, that the public always completes every work of art.  So unlike Tchaikovsky, who had nightmares about the fact that he would be best remembered for the “1812” Overture and “The Nutcracker,” Dickens shrewdly saw the dramatic and commercial opportunities for “A Christmas Carol” early on.  Nine years after writing it, Dickens read the novella publicly to a literary society in Birmingham and three days later to a working-class audience.  Both groups were mesmerized, according to newspaper accounts.

That same tradition continued on with stage actors for decades well into the radio era although, curiously, the thought of actually dramatizing the story gained more popularity when silent movies came in, allowing for dissolves and such that could make the ghosts described in the story actually appear via camera tricks.  In the case of the Goodman Theatre, one of the oldest attempts to literalize the story on a live stage, the earliest adaptation thirty-one years ago opened with Dickens himself writing the story on stage at his desk with a quill pen and serving as a pseudo-narrator, although he became gradually less relevant as the action progressed.  Much was made about the first time that various ghosts took flight on stage in the early 1980s, and long before falling chandeliers and helicopter landings became commonplace in mega-musicals of the later 1980s, plenty of folks were coming to the Goodman “A Christmas Carol” for the stagecraft more than the story.  There were times when the production became so behemoth and so stripped to the bone narratively that Dickens seemed to fade away from the proceedings almost as mysteriously as Marley’s face on Scrooge’s knocker.

In this year’s production, a small Greek chorus of jovial carolers endeavor to tell the story, right from “Marley is dead” and like that first Goodman adaptation some three decades ago, they fade away from the proceedings but do appear now and then when a jolt of Dickensian language is needed.  After all, when the narrative is stripped bare apart from its social commentary and wry humor and eloquent storytelling, even Mister Magoo can play Ebenezer Scrooge.

Larry Yando as Goodman's Scrooge

The problem that poor Larry Yando, a terrifically talented actor who is playing Goodman’s Scrooge for a second year, has is to flesh out a character via dialogue that does not benefit from Dickens’ own insertive language.  Invariably, this means that Yando, like most Scrooge portrayals, ends up coming across at the beginning more cranky and mean than the book and more joyous and childlike in the end as a literal contrast has to be drawn.

The huge advantage that Michael Halberstam has in his solo performance of “A Christmas Carol” at Writers’ Theatre is that his own portrayal of Scrooge can be far more subtle because he can play up Dickens’ own descriptions.  His Scrooge is more indifferent than mean, very matter of fact.  I haven’t heard the recordings of our state’s governor, for instance, allegedly refusing to pay children’s hospital funds without a kickback, but I would be quite surprised if he were hissing or screaming as he is doing so.  Usually such “requests” are calm and cool.  People can often be polite when they utter the casually brutal equivalent of “Are there no prisons?  Are there no workhouses?”  If Scrooge is angry, he is less interesting.  It is indifference that is responsible for his isolation, not a temper.

By the same time, the transformation that Scrooge goes through during “A Christmas Carol” is one of self-discovery through his life’s journey.  We see him become indifferent when his father leaves him at school over the holidays because the alternative is to fall apart.  As an older man, he can recognize the cruelty of this in a way that psychological self-defense would never permit when he is a teenager.  Scrooge has become his father in his dealings with his clerk and others, but only by recalling the pain that the indifference of his father towards him does he come to see this.  And so it goes, encounter by encounter, Scrooge even assuming that the point of his visitations is for self improvement, which is why he cannot bring himself to even consider the possibility that the first death portrayed during the Ghost of Christmas Future visitation could be his own.

The other detail made so clear in Halberstam’s performance that is lost at Goodman is that Scrooge has learned to stop feeling much of anything at all, good or bad.  So when he does start to feel some things once again with the Spirits, he wants to dismiss these in Dickens’ language.  And he cynically jokes with the ghosts as much as he is afraid of them, realizing it could be indigestion, or even senility, since these visitations were supposed to happen over three nights so he could have well missed Christmas entirely.

And what of the transformation at the end?  How radical is it?  Dickens gives Scrooge enough of a heart at the beginning—after all, the clerk does end up with the day off—and enough impatience at the end as he is watching himself try to be polite to a boy that he condescendingly finds can actually converse and quip, that there is more ambiguity here than Goodman or other literal adaptations can allow.

Halberstam and Writers Theatre are on to something very important in their rediscovery of “A Christmas Carol” as a solo performance work: the power of great storytelling itself in communicating the soul of a story vs. stringing together a host of scenes portrayed literally and hoping that the end result will be more than the sum of its parts.

This difference can best be seen in the response of young children to both approaches: children love Goodman’s “A Christmas Carol,” perhaps especially the “scary” parts, much like an amusement-park ride.  And adults love to bring children to watch them watch the experience.  The few young children who were brought to Writers’ Theatre “A Christmas Carol” however, barely made it through the first scene.  Some were just bored, to be sure, but others were struck down with primordial terror by the intensity and power of a single storyteller baring and focusing his all.  Children tend to have far more developed imaginations than most of us do as we get older, and Dickens’ eloquence is such that each of us in our own way conjures up in our mind’s eye something far more terrifying than anything the most literal staging of “A Christmas Carol” could possibly convey.

“A Christmas Carol” runs at the Goodman Theatre, (312)443-3820, through December 31; and at Writers’ Theatre, (847)242-6000, through December 23.

Alan Wilder (Ivan), John Mahoney (Richard) and Francis Guinan (Sharky). Photo by Michael Brosilow.

RECOMMENDED

Booze and religion have always made strange bedfellows. In Christianity, you have a founder who goes to a party and changes water into wine, and reportedly not the cheap stuff, either. Even the gospels have Jesus being directly accused of being a glutton and a drunkard by his detractors. And that was in a sunny, warm and dry country. In an Irish winter, where the long, cold dark nights howl and days are gray and short, drinking becomes a national pastime. Add Christmas into the mix, and well, you get the idea.

In Conor McPherson’s “The Seafarer,” five guys are sitting around and drinking on Christmas Eve having the same kind of dull and meaningless conversations that come up when that happens (if this all sounds familiar, much the same scenario—right down to a dilapidated drunk Christmas in Dublin—occurs in McPherson’s “A Dublin Carol,” which Steppenwolf is presenting upstairs concurrently with McPherson’s “The Seafarer”). One of the guys, however, reveals himself as the Devil to one of the characters in a private moment, and lets the guy know that he would be in hell right now if he hadn’t been able to beat the Devil at a card game when they were in jail together years ago. They’ll be playing again tonight, but the results will be different and the two will enter the netherworld through a hole in the wall. Of course, this all seems quite reasonable when you’re drunk, but the problem for an audience that is sober is how literally this all appears to go down, making you think that you’re suddenly spending the holidays with Mel Gibson.

For my taste, McPherson wants to have the sophistication and metaphor of “The Seventh Seal” with the religious sensibility of “The Omen,” but like booze and religion, these make for strange companions. Perhaps when the brain is booze-soaked, people need more radical wake-up calls, and for those of a fundamentalist disposition who like to get drunk, this is your holiday play. For the rest of us, thankfully, there is enough of McPherson’s eloquent writing and a first-class Steppenwolf ensemble who act the shit out of this material—including Steppenwolf founding member John Mahoney back at the company—enough to make this a worthwhile experience, even sober. (Dennis Polkow)

Through February 22, 2009 at Steppenwolf Downstairs Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted, (773)335-1650; $20-$70.

RECOMMENDED

Workshopped at Northwestern in 1993, premiered at Bailiwick in 1995 and performed as an annual holiday tradition there until 2006, “The Christmas Schooner” has had more than a hundred productions across the country and abroad. Bailiwick had announced 2006 as the work’s final voyage for the company but is presenting the piece as a bittersweet swansong to its Belmont Avenue home with all of the trimmings, including a five-piece orchestra and new direction by Mary Beidler Gearen.

I had never seen a single production of this work at Bailiwick nor anywhere else, nor did the idea of a musical about transporting Christmas trees particularly entice me. “What is at stake?” as a colleague of mine always likes to ask in discussing shows. Well, quite a bit, as it turns out—the traditions and values that make us who we are. The songs do a wonderful job of conveying the emotions that the story needs to communicate and of giving us a sense of what a Chicago Christmas was like more than a century ago.

It’s so ironic that in a year where we are still debating having a smaller tabletop tree vs. the full boat experience, if you’ll forgive the pun, the presence of a nineteenth-century-style tree on stage with fruit and nuts as decorations along with the descriptions of the “magic” of a traditional Christmas tree becomes quite enticing. Long before electric lights, plastic Santas, balloon globes and the myriads of Christmas kitsch that make up the retail-centered holiday season as it exists today that climaxes well before Christmas itself, European immigrants of a century ago had only the Christmas tree as the focal point of their celebrations, mesmerizing all who experienced it. Advent was dark and dreary, but when Christmas Eve arrived and though Epiphany, January 6, or the Twelfth Day of Christmas, the Christmas tree warmed hearts at the darkest and coldest point of the year. Up north, as in Michigan, that is not a problem, but when a Chicago cousin writes to her Michigan relatives who are sailors by trade that “there are so many people, so few evergreens” in the city after sharing her searing memories of childhood Christmas trees back home in Germany, the family decides to make one last late November journey of the season. Three generations of the Stossel family all end up deeply impacted by these annual journeys to Clark Street harbor, where not only Germans but immigrants of varied backgrounds end up lining up to get the best pick of the trees.

Ultimately, this becomes a family love story crisscrossing generations as well as a tale of duty and honor and maintaining sea traditions as well as Christmas traditions, passing on what we have been given and as “Opa” (Jim Sherman) observes, that “If we accept our blessings, we accept our pain as well.” Tying up such a message in a Christmas package filled with music makes it all the more palatable, but no less important. (Dennis Polkow)

“The Christmas Schooner” plays through January 4 at Bailiwick Repertory Theatre, 1229 W. Belmont, (773)883-1090. $20-$35.

Its fifth year running, Theater Wit’s one-man adaptation by Joe Mantello of the classic David Sedaris tale is starting to wear a bit thin, but luckily the brilliance and durability of the humor in the writing carries through. Mitchell Fain, though charming, charismatic and graced with perfect timing, works a little too hard to convince the audience that he’s charming, charismatic and graced with perfect timing, splicing in innumerable asides to the audience and dirty jokes told over a martini glass that he occasionally thrusts towards the audience as a toast—the whole effect just feels a bit too forced and more like stand-up than a theatrical adaptation of an almost perfectly constructed and beautifully cynical radio essay. Still, Fain feels like your bitchy best friend, over-the-top and indulgently offensive, and some absolutely hilarious moments, such as his fantasy of Billie Holiday performing a burlesque “Away in a Manger” make “Santaland” worth seeing. (Monica Westin)

At Theatre Building Chicago, 1225 W. Belmont, 773-327-5252. Through January 3.

RECOMMENDED

Gian Carlo Menotti’s television opera “Amahl & the Night Visitors” is a Baby Boomer holiday favorite which was first broadcast live on NBC on Christmas Eve 1951 to millions of viewers and was broadcast consecutively on the network every Christmas Eve through 1966, becoming one of the most performed live holiday shows of all time.

The composer himself told me of an unusual performance where he sat next to proud mother Jacqueline Kennedy as her children John-John and Caroline played shepherds in a production in Washington (“Caroline sporting a white beard”).

This one-act work (as in short for the attention-challenged) is one of those truly rare family works that is immediately accessible on every level—by both children and opera novices—and yet is still meaningful to the most seasoned opera-goers. As last year, Chamber Opera Chicago production will be directed by the composer’s son and former Chicagoan Francis Menotti and will be based on the 1951 original television production staging of his father with most of the same extraordinary cast from last year, including COC artistic director Barbara Landis as Amahl’s mother, Patrick Blackwell as Balthazar, Christopher Lorimer as Kaspar and Aaron Stegemöller as Melchior. The role of Amahl will be divided by a two newcomers and superb Amahl veteran Micahel Zajakowski Uhll (Dec. 7) for each performance and Victoria Bond will conduct. (Dennis Polkow)

7:30pm December 5, 3pm December 6, 7, Harold Washington Library Center’s Pritzker Auditorium, 400 S. State, $10-$25, (312)951-7944.

RECOMMENDED

The good news is that the Radio City Christmas Spectacular is back this year a bit later than the past two years, when it was practically a Halloween show, but the bad news is that there is a shorter time window to actually catch it. This edition is being dubbed as the “10^th annual” Chicago production, forgetting about the fact that the show actually did not run here for a couple of years and that it has never actually played within the city limits.

Since 2006, the show has been readjusted, and some of the newer stuff is really starting to wear thin, notably Santa pretending to pick an “audience member” with dance shoes who knows her mark to dance the Nutcracker with the dancing bears, and a really annoyingly shrill Mrs. Claus to whom Santa sings “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” The tap dance “Twelve Days of Christmas” goes on forever and “Santa’s Gonna Rock and Roll” is lame. And yes, the canned music and tap track actually got slightly off from one another during this year’s opening; as great as this show is, it boggles the imagination to think of what would happen if a live orchestra were employed as it is in New York.

That said, there is still plenty of what everyone comes to this show for: legs, legs, legs, i.e., the Rockettes, that line of sleek, gorgeous women who dance and sing their hearts out in stunning, sexy costumes. I confess that no Christmas is complete for me until seeing the Rockettes kick up in those red-spangled Santa costumes out of a New York cab. Sarah Palin, eat your heart out.

And though I am starting to wonder about the ethics of keeping two camels, four sheep and a donkey penned up behind the theater for an admittedly impressive two-minute “walk on” during “The Living Nativity,” the finale gets me every time. (Dennis Polkow)

$25-$65. Through December 7 at the Rosemont Theater, 5400 N. River Rd., Rosemont, (312)559-1212.

RECOMMENDED

Look closely at any religion and it’ll seem ridiculous. The Bible is chockablock with the bizarre and unlikely. Most people are fine with it, I would argue, because these stories have become normalized. Get enough folks believing in something and suddenly it doesn’t seem insane.

Personally, I think it’s all hooey. Give me rational individualism any day. But I get why people gravitate to religion, and why others clutch at it with white knuckles and unwavering conviction. Life is tough and fucked up; religion offers structure and solace and a code of conduct spelled out in no uncertain terms. Religion is the answer to all the questions nagging at the corners of your mind. It defines and shapes your outlook on life, and I’d put my own agnostic atheism in that boat, as well. It’s all a type of religion, no matter what you call it.

Which brings me to “A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant,” a weirdly entrancing musical from 2003 currently in a totally modest, totally stupendous production at A Red Orchid Theatre. The cast is comprised entirely of preteens and, geez, these kids are hilariously cute. Najwa Brown plays the spunky narrator: “Today we relate the life of L. Ron Hubbard,” she solemnly intones.

The show is a half-snicker away from full snark, but directors Lance Baker and Steve Wilson have done something very cagey here. (The show is created by New Yorkers Kyle Jarrow and Alex Timbers.) Their child actors play it straight—with those super-duper smiles and an amateurish kiddie-pageant performance style—but there is something much deeper and more affecting going on here.

Look, far as I’m concerned, the Church of Scientology is ludicrous. But no more so than any other religion. You think aliens are a stretch? Then why is a “sky god” so easy to swallow, as Bill Maher might say? Religion is an elaborate con job. That doesn’t mean it’s bad.

We all have an emptiness that needs to be filled with something, and L. Ron—which sounds like “Elron” from the mouths of these kids—wasn’t exactly off the mark when he pointed to emotional baggage as one of the roadblocks to a happy life. His methods are nuts, granted, and it’s hard to see his church as anything more than a money-and-power-making venture. But the religion resonates with someone. A lot of someones, actually. It seems hypocritical to treat it as any more of a joke than other religions.

And that’s what makes the show work. Directors Baker and Wilson openly acknowledge the wackness that is Scientology, but they don’t treat it as a punchline. They do, however, have an awful lot of fun with it. The kids explain the bizarro auditing process with a perky puppet show. They dance the robot. They sing their little hearts out and clap to the music and I defy anyone to resist their enthusiasm. Aria Szalai-Raymond (in a brief turn as Mother Hubbard, plus a harried New Yorker) has a very mature energy that stands out—she is poised but funny. And Chaz Allen, as L. Ron himself, is strangely, perfectly in command. I can’t remember the last time I saw young actors this good.

But the show is so much more than a stupid comedy about Scientology. Jackson Callinor plays an old army buddy-turned-IRS agent looking to bring L. Ron down, and there are wells of emotion just beneath the surface of his face. This kid is a real actor and he brings a palpable soulfulness to the role. L. Ron works his magic, but the end result leaves Callinor’s character just as bereft as ever. Which path to take? And then, blackout. Wow. (Nina Metz)

At A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 N. Wells, (312)943-8722 or www.aredorchidtheatre.org. Fri 8p, Sat 7p & 9p, Sun 3p. $20-$25. Through January 4.

RECOMMENDED

In the vast pantheon of Christmas theater, “Dublin Carol” is unique first and foremost because it is a play powerful and eloquent enough be performed outside of the holiday season. Yes, every minute takes place on Christmas Eve, but Irish playwright Conor McPhearson’s 2000 booze-soaked retrograde riff on “A Christmas Carol” might well be called “Anatomy of an Alcoholic,” so powerfully does it give its audience a phenomenology of what the ravages of alcoholism do to an individual as well as all those around him or her.

We have all been on the receiving end of the endless boozy broadcasts that veteran Chicago actor turned “CSI” television star William Petersen as John relentlessly and convincingly gives in “Carol.” As he is boring and alienating his 20-year-old assistant Mark (Stephen Louis Grush) to death, he tells Mark about a bartender who had “a good listening quality” and adds, “You have it, too.” Sure. It’s called being held hostage. Booze tends to clog up receivers, i.e., the ability to listen and respond to others and their needs, but often does wonders for broadcasting a wealth of useless information that sounds like wisdom under the influence but like the crap it usually is to those who are sober. And yet, every now and then, some truths cut so deeply that even the effects of the bottle cannot fully numb them.

The “redemptive” moment, if you want to call it that, is an unexpected visit from John’s daughter (Nicole Wiesner) that he hasn’t seen in ten years, coming to courageously ask him to come visit her mother and his estranged wife, who is dying of cancer. After an endless self-absorbed checklist of sins of commission and omission and a powerful confession of squandered attempts to get his life back together along the way, his daughter asks if he had to do things all over again, would he do things differently? In an inverted “It’s A Wonderful Life” response, John tells her that he just wishes it had all just “never happened.” “Do you wish I had never happened?” she voices, to no response. It’s one of those moments that you hope will imitate art when it happens in real life, but most often, doesn’t. His silence speaks volumes that she of course, can interpret as a lack of love for her personally, but the reality is that this is a man that hasn’t been able to love himself nor feel much else in decades, and to make matters worse, admits as much, drunk or sober.

Aside from one of the most eloquent monologues on the manic hell of alcoholism from the inside out (McPhearson has made his struggle public and, curiously, his more recent “on the wagon” plays are less monologue-like and feature more character interaction and narrative than his earlier soliloquy-filled “off the wagon” plays) perhaps the most fascinating aspect of “Dublin Carol” is that it does not reach for the formulaic finale of most Yuletide yarns. Exactly what happens to John, who already has ignored his daughter’s plea not to drink before coming to the hospital, is never fully revealed under Steppenwolf ensemble member Amy Morton’s direction (her first Steppenwolf project back home since her Tony Award-nominated Broadway role in “August: Osage County” although she’s set to open the same role in London this week), though fascinatingly, audience members coming out of the opening were sure that it had. Does he go, or does he sit around continuing to soak himself in denial and self-pity? There are strong staging hints in both directions, to be sure, but we are left in the ambiguity that a world anesthetized by alcohol tends to approximate. (Dennis Polkow)

“Dublin Carol” plays through January 4 at the Steppenwolf Upstairs Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted, $50-$70. (312)335-1650.

RECOMMENDED

At this time of the year, there are plenty of “haunted house” options for Halloween thrill seekers, most consisting of long dark hallways populated with masked marauders who seek to pop out suddenly at the most unexpected moment. Your heart pounds, you get an adrenaline rush, and then you see that, well, it’s just a guy in a cheesy mask. To quote B.B. King, “The thrill is gone.”

What separates Oracle Productions “Disturbed III” from such offerings is that it attempts to leave you with a fright that you can take home with you, something to think about. Yes, there are dark halls and even some pop-outs. But what stays with you is what you experience after the “boo!” factor. As these gifted performance artists interact with you and act their soulless little hearts out for you in cramped quarters, when the light is good enough, the makeup, special effects and costumes are convincing enough that, well, they often don’t look like theatrical trappings.

A deadpan host ushers you in and is able to look you right in the eye as he cautiously introduces various “experiments” by a resident mad doctor who seems all the more mad because he has reasonable lapses of sanity as he attempts to explain himself. And the experiments themselves, complete with glowing eyes that dart around in the dark and who beg for your help more mercilessly than the panhandlers outside the theater, really do a convincing job of making you feel as if you are encountering truly tortured, lost souls.

Oh, and did I mention that this is all preceded by a running projector showing you dissections and botched psychological surgeries of the past? By the time the whole thing has ended, you end up in a back alley where you’re not sure which was worse: going in, or coming out to savor the scares for the trip home. (Dennis Polkow)

At Oracle Theatre, 3809 North Broadway, (773)244-2980; $9, through November 1,

After two consecutive Halloween seasons of having Edgar Allan Poe haunt the Tudor Peabody Estate in west suburban Oakbrook, First Folio (formerly First Folio Shakespeare Festival) has instead invited Count Dracula over this year for the holidays.

This is the Bob Hall and David Richmond off-Broadway adaptation, meant to be sexy and funny and preceding subsequent, admittedly more biting, satirical Draculas by decades. Given the opening-night audience reaction, which was deadpan serious (myself and the critic next to me were laughing now and then, but we seemed to be the only ones doing so and, after awhile, we were even getting looks from vampire purists), there is a disconnect here, whether by accident or design.

But the work is staged and acted so seriously that the confusion is understandable: every time Dracula appears, the fog machines go into overdrive; at one point the lights go out and a glow-in-the-dark bat is hovering over the audience in true William Castle fashion; at another point, a crucifix explodes into flames, which can have other meanings, especially in the suburbs. Meanwhile, Renfield is constantly chasing flies to eat while his doctors and the hero and heroine seem to think that they’re doing the real deal but with a bewildering variety of shifting accents.

But the biggest problem is that unlike the Poe show, where there was constant interaction between cast and audience that was helped along by having various scenes staged in various rooms of the house, here, we are ushered in a side door and stay put in one room with all of the action off to one side, as if we aren’t even there. (Dennis Polkow)

At Mayslake Peabody Estate, Route 83 & 31^st Street; Oakbrook, (630)986-8067. $23-$30. Through November 2.