When Rob Melrose became the Artistic Director of the Alley Theatre in November 2018, during one of the first board meetings, a three-year plan was presented and one of the items on it was “New artistic director creates new version of A Christmas Carol.
“It was either my first week or second week on the job and I thought ‘Oh well, I guess that’s me,'” he says laughing.
That plan didn’t want or expect the new version to be introduced right away, he adds. The Michael Wilson version of Ebenezer Scrooge’s classic redemption story would continue to be told in the same way while the new script was readied. Then, of course, the pandemic hit; there was a hiatus in live performance and as it turned out, the Wilson version was never done again by the Alley. Instead, a video version of the script by Doris Baizley featuring a company of traveling players about to enact the Christmas Carol was shown one year in a video version and the next on stage.
All of which gave Melrose the opportunity to really spend time on the writing, delve into the Charles Dickens novella that was the source material and consider audience reactions to the previous version by Michael Wilson which had been performed for several years.
The time away from live performances also enabled Melrose and General Manager Dean Gladden to hit the road together, taking in a number of Christmas Carols across the country (the Broadway version, ones at the Guthrie and Goodman Theatre and others) and then throw ideas back and forth about what they thought worked and what didn’t, Melrose says.
“That’s when I landed on magic, music and Dickens,” Melrose says. “I felt like the truer a version was to the story, the more I liked it. The more it invented new things that aren’t in the novella, the more I thought it aged poorly. Because you really felt those parts that seemed cool 20 years ago but now, like steam punk, it was a fad 20 years ago but really it’s not so great right now.” (The Panto drag aspects of Morley and Mrs, Dilber the housekeeper in the Wilson version have been discarded).
Even before the pandemic hit, Melrose attended the artist residency program Ucross in Wyoming where he started work on adapting his script (and eventually the Alley established a connection to creative foundation.) During the pandemic he says “that’s when I got a first draft done.” He did a two-week Zoom workshop with the resident acting company then. In August he was back at Ucross and got to hear a Zoom reading of his script. “I got to finish and tighten and cut it a bit.”
“Then of course we had the whole pandemic to design it.”
Melrose is quick to say that a lot of Alley audience members said they loved A Christmas Carol as is and didn’t want it changed. Others thought it could use a little freshening up and still others said they thought it was too scary for young kids and therefore weren’t taking their children to it.
“A lot of families said the Michael Wilson version which really leans into — the subtitle is “A Ghost Story of Christmas” — it starts with a dance of Marie Antoinette with an axe in her skull, it’s scary right off the bat and so families said ‘Gosh we like this version but we can’t really bring our kids.’“
And that wasn’t good for any number of reasons, most of all because the Alley counts on Christmas Carol to be its cash cow every year, its revenues bolstering the costs of some other, lesser known, newer and in some cases riskier riskier productions.
Melrose says the new script emphasizes the heartwarming aspects of the tale, instead of the creepy factor. It will also be filled with humor, the intellectual and “cheeky” humor that Dickens himself employed in his writing.
Usually just three scenes are shown in any staging of A Christmas Carol: counting house, Scrooge’s house and the Cratchit home, Melrose says, with other locations shown by highlighting a corner of the stage. “Or you just had a bare stage.
“The new Alley production features 21 different locations. We asked ourselves how can we do a production where we have all the locations? The way [Scenic Designer] Michael [Locher] did it was creating this warehouse full of these Victorian dollhouses. So we actually have these very accurate representations of all the places we’re going to go in the story but they’re in miniature. So it ends up being very theatrical but very richly detailed.”
As for the music and magic parts:
There will be music from Dickens’ time (15 different traditional carols sung acapella). “They are all songs he would have known about.”
The Alley brought in Jim Steinmeyer, a famous illusionist from Los Angeles who has worked with Disney and David Copperfield and Doug Henning and other famous magicians. “He’s created some rally exciting illusions with more spectacular elements. We also worked with Afsaneh Aayani who did all these puppets.”
Asked what exactly is different about the special effects this time around, Melrose becomes circumspect, saying he doesn’t want to ruin the surprise.
“We have the effects that theater goers are used to like traps in the floor. That’s magic that we all know about. But in addition to Jim we invested in a brand new elevator lift that’s going to make on theatrical effect unlike anything anyone has seen at the Alley.”
“Jim has actually built some effects that are more the kind of effects you’d see in a magic show rather than just an actor disappearing down a trap.”
The cast of A Christmas Carol includes Alley’s Resident Acting Company members Elizabeth Bunch as The Ghost of Christmas Past, Dylan Godwin as Bob Cratchit, Shawn Hamilton as The Ghost of Christmas Present, Chris Hutchison as Marley, Melissa Molano as Belle, Melissa Pritchett as Mrs. Cratchit, David Rainey as Ebenezer Scrooge, Christopher Salazar as Fred and Todd Waite as Mr. Fezziwig.
Melrose also adopted the narration techniques used in a production of Nicholas Nickleby that he saw when he was young. “In which the company took on a lot of the narration. I like productions like that.” He says using this methods allows them to “get a lot of Dickens’ wit, irony and rich descriptions into the play.”
The actors involved have they’ve been really open to the new staging, Melrose says. Some are playing parts they’ve done before; most are in new roles, he points out. “They’ve been wanting to do something new for a while,” he says. And being on the ground floor of a new production, they get to help create it instead of stepping into roles that have already been established in a certain way, he says. “Now everybody’s part of the creation.”
“I think people who felt like I’ve seen Christmas Carol a bunch of times I don’t need to come see it. All those people I hope come and check out the new version because I think they’ll really like it. I think our old version was really about being creepy and scary this version s about getting Christmas started. It’s about hearing Christmas carols.
“It’s really about the spirit and the heart of the story more than it is about scary stuff. Also I tried to make it in a version that kids would enjoy but also a lot of the richness of Dickens so that adults will appreciate the wit and the humor, just how really smart vis is. I just tapped all the great stuff in the Dickens,” Melrose says.
“I really tried to capture as much of Dickens’ language as possible and really tried to invent very little or what I did invent I tried to be very subtle about it, erase my tracks.”
Performances are scheduled for November 18 through Friday December 30 at varied times including 7 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 1 p.m. and 6 p.m. Sundays and also 2 p.m. Saturdays at Alley Theatre, 615 Texas. For more information call 713-220-5700 or visit alleytheatre.org. $26-$121.
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This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2022.
