Sarah Knapp as Christmas Past in the North Shore Music Theatre's 19th year of Dickens' "A Christmas Carol."
(PAUL LYDEN)
Stage Review
BEVERLY - For 19 years, North Shore Music Theatre has been presenting a "Christmas Carol" adaptation that's a natural match of the theater's identity and the show's holiday theme: a musical version, embellishing the Charles Dickens story with plenty of carols and dancing. As holiday entertainments go, this one is hard to beat.
Every year brings slight adjustments to the formula, however, and this year's model - "A Christmas Carol: A Musical Ghost Story," to give it its official name here - feels unusually noisy and bright. It's no accident that the credits include a director of pyrotechnics. And while Michael Goudzwaard is undoubtedly skilled at setting things on fire, "A Christmas Carol" seemed just fine to me without a flaming torch for the Ghost of Christmas Past or a veritable fountain of fireworks to introduce Jacob Marley.
Marley's entrance, in fact, is so bright that it actually hurts your eyes - to say nothing of the headache-inducing glare from the flashing strobes. It's understandable that director Jon Kimbell wants to keep things lively for the younger crowd, but this level of flash and fury is more than even my Xbox-loving companion wanted for his holiday show.
The creepiness factor is also a little too far up the meter for my taste, particularly for a show that many younger children will attend. Mine is a non-squeamish 10-year-old, but even he was scared beyond the pleasantly tingly stage by some of the bone-rattling sound cues and morbid visual effects.
Here's the thing (and you can file this under Sentences I Never Thought I'd Have to Write): No one wants to see a dead body in a holiday show. And yet there it is, the wretched little figure of Tiny Tim, laid out on a table by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. What is this, "CSI: London"?
On one level, I do sympathize. If I had to stage "A Christmas Carol" for 19 years, with no relief in sight, I'd find ways to switch it up a little, too. And Dickens was certainly no stranger to darkness and death. But because of what this particular Dickens story has come to be in American culture - a pleasant way to introduce the kids to the theater and induce a spirit of seasonally appropriate charity for the grown-ups - there's a limit to how sharp an edge it can, or should, have. People who want something darker will choose "Sweeney Todd" anyway.
Parental objections aside, it's also simply less affecting to see a child actor, however talented, trying to lie still for a whole long scene rather than having our eyes drawn to the pathetic sight of an empty chair with a tiny crutch. That may be sentimental, but it's also moving; having the little corpse onstage is just overkill.
Another innovation, having the three acrobatic dancers who've appeared in previous years take a more active role in moving the scenery around and the story along, sometimes works but often distracts. They occasionally block sightlines, and they also feel anachronistic: With everyone else in the usual sumptuous Victorian brocades (or artful rags), why are they tricked out like refugees from a modern dance festival?
All that said, North Shore still offers many of its usual enticements over the show's more than two hours: lively dancing, crisp vocal performances, and a smoothly polished telling of the tale. David Coffee, amazingly, is playing Scrooge for the 16th time, and his experience shows both in the growling bluster of the early scenes and the liberated, childlike glee at the end. If he, along with a few others, sometimes oversells the most famous lines, no doubt it's hard to resist that temptation after saying them so many times.
For me, though, carols sound best sung softly, not roared by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. And I'd like this "Carol" better if, like those of Christmases past, it were smaller, softer, and just a little bit more sweet.
Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.
