Benator’s miser is more amoral than immoral. His treatment of Bob Cratchit (Christopher L. This feels very different from a typical Scrooge portrayal. Watkins is arrested and thrown into debtor’s prison - whose interests are the police serving? - we see that Benator’s Scrooge is not, in fact, emotionally invested in cruelty. (Watkins is played by Neal Ghant, who gives this small part real intensity.) Scrooge comes along, demanding loan repayment.

Watkins selling fruit from his cart with his young family, trying to make ends meet. Quite naturally, he seems the clinical, cerebral villain. It works, too, since Andrew Benator’s Ebenezer Scrooge is awkward in manner, with a narrow, inexpressive face.

Most of the actors play multiple roles or sing as street carolers, thoroughly convincingly. It works, in part, because Leora Morris’ incisive stage direction helps shape distinct personalities within a large cast of characters. Bell’s adaptation, replacing his earlier one that enjoyed a two-decade run, the core of his new narrative revolves around the selfish harm done by a rich individual to a whole town of people, a whole lifetime of people. This element comes to the fore in the Alliance’s retelling. But as these billionaires have shrewdly calculated, and as the Ghost of Marley cries out in repentance, “The poor are poor because we made them so!” Scanning the audience, I didn’t spot any of the celebrity tycoons known for having a business model based on impoverishing their workers. We embrace A Christmas Carol, and yet society still privileges the “job creators” ahead of the clerks and maids. It’s a ghost story that triggers the happiest sentimentality - God bless us, every one! - although we never learn its lessons. Andrew Benator as Scrooge and Matthew Morris as Jacob Marley in the afterlife It’s set, lovingly, in the era long before polio and tuberculosis vaccines, which might have saved the life of Tiny Tim, even without Scrooge’s intervention.

It’s time again for the Alliance Theatre’s A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens’ heartwarming fable of extreme wealth inequality and Victorian meat puddings. This holiday season, it’s important to remind people of the true meaning of Christmas: ghosts terrorizing rich people in the middle of the night until they agree to pay their employees more. There’s a meme going around the internet and perhaps you’ve seen it:

A christmas carol original book