It sounds so charming: Benedict Nightingale, the esteemed London theater critic, trying to make a Christmas Eve tradition of reading Charles Dickens’s ghostly novella “A Christmas Carol” to his small children by the fire. The only trouble being, his son Christopher said, that the tradition, several decades ago, didn’t catch on.
“It worked for about one year, maybe two years,” he recalled, and laughed. “I loved the fact that he was reading to us, and the story’s cool. I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t that successful, put it that way.”
As introductions to the tale of Ebenezer Scrooge go, though, that one eventually worked out well. In the Old Vic production of “A Christmas Carol,” which went to Broadway in 2019, Christopher Nightingale’s Tony Award-winning score is the most ethereal and transporting element, comfortingly familiar, exalting and nostalgic all at once.
Currently running a stone’s throw from Wall Street at the Perelman Performing Arts Center, where the ensemble of actors plays some of the music on handbells, the Jack Thorne adaptation is a distinctive take on Dickens’s original. Yet the retelling, conceived and directed by Matthew Warchus, is in keeping with Dickens’s social message that hardhearted greed is bad, and kindly selflessness is the way to go.
Holiday classics like “A Christmas Carol,” “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Amahl and the Night Visitors” — all getting outings on Manhattan stages this season — are durable by nature. As with any beloved work of art, their meaning can alter for individuals over time, and deepen with repetition. They can also land differently depending on who’s interpreting them, and how.
In Warchus’s production, the obscenely wealthy, notoriously tightfisted Scrooge is not the prototypical old man in a nightcap. Rather, he is “properly in midlife-crisis zone,” Warchus said — young enough so that when his redemption comes, “there’s enough of his life left for a reformed person to make a difference.” And when, after the visits from all the ghosts, Scrooge arrives at Christmas Day, the ensuing scene is heavily inspired by the joyful, over-the-top silliness of the traditional British pantomimes that Warchus grew up delighting in at Christmastime.
It is, perhaps, a bit jarring that Thorne has reimagined kindly Mr. Fezziwig, to whom Scrooge was apprenticed when he was starting out, as the owner not of a warehouse but of a funeral home. And Warchus remembers some critics fussing about his “Christmas Carol” not including Ignorance and Want, the wretched children whom Dickens describes huddling under the skirts of the Ghost of Christmas Present.
Still, he said, “A lot of people who know the story in different versions are more inclined to enjoy the variations rather than balk at them.”
A bit uptown, at Irish Repertory Theater, the director Charlotte Moore is revisiting a film favorite from her own early childhood, Frank Capra’s 1946 classic, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” by staging an adaptation of it for the third time.
“I’m such a sentimentalist,” Moore said, calling Christmas “the ultimate holiday for sentimentalists.”
So she is upping the ante in Anthony E. Palermo’s small-cast, radio-play reworking, “It’s a Wonderful Life!,” this time adding music from the 1930s and ’40s that she grew up with in Southern Illinois.
“Everybody thinks they know the script, and they probably do,” she said. “And they know a lot of these songs, too.”
But Moore is betting that her stage incarnation is far enough from cinematic to tap into the imaginations of audience members, even those who feel proprietary about the film — a holiday-season perennial starring James Stewart as George Bailey, an Everyman who falls into despair at Christmastime, and whose small-town neighbors rally around him.
Its spirit of coming together is distinctly postwar; to Moore, the story has “an innocence that seems lost.” She would like to “get a bit of that back if I can,” she said. But to her, the fundamental requirement is a certain fidelity.
“The essence of the question, or challenge, is to keep the spirit of the piece,” Moore said. “I want to make sure it’s there for people, and me.”
The mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato is also touching base with a work she has loved since she was a child, Gian Carlo Menotti’s short opera from 1951, “Amahl and the Night Visitors.” Next week she is slated to make her debut in it, singing the role of Amahl’s Mother at Lincoln Center Theater, where Kenny Leon is staging a new production.
As a girl listening with her family each Christmas morning to her father’s LP, DiDonato could picture clearly the little boy, Amahl, and the crutch he uses, and the three kings entering on their camels as they follow a star in the night sky.
“It’s etched into me,” DiDonato said. “This is a strange thing perhaps to say as an opera singer, but it has always been my favorite opera. It’s a perfect piece.”
Its story, too, delivers a moral message about selflessness — one that lands with booster-shot force when she re-encounters it.
“It is, in my case, an annual reminder of how I want to be,” DiDonato said. “And I get off the track so often that it just kind of recenters me.”
Leon has no personal history with Menotti’s opera, which was commissioned by NBC and was a longtime fixture of Christmastime programming. But, partly thanks to the 20-plus acquaintances who have called to tell him so, he is keenly aware that many people cherish it.
And he knows, from his extensive experience in reviving classics (yes, he has directed “A Christmas Carol”), that audience members can have vehement ideas about their staging.
But when he looks at the title of the opera, the name Amahl “says to me that that young kid is brown or Black,” he said. “When this opera is done, that’s not how it’s mostly done.”
It’s how he is doing it, though, making the opera look “like America looks” and “like the Middle East looks,” he said, and in the process broadening its reach.
“I want people to be able to find themselves in the story, which is what I always hope for all revivals, but especially holiday revivals,” Leon added. “We need to be able to find ourselves in it.”
Which characters we find ourselves in can change as we age, he said, but holiday classics themselves, popping up once a year, help us gauge our collective humanity.
“You can find ourselves in ‘A Christmas Carol’ all the time,” he said. “Who’s the Cratchits and who’s the Scrooges, and what are we doing?”
The shows offer a simple test of our evolution, he said: “Do we love each other better or worse?”
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