By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Spoiler alert: Scrooge is redeemed in the end.
Yes, when we first meet him in the Toledo Rep’s annual production of “A Christmas Carol,” Scrooge (Paul Causman) seems an impossible case, set off into hum bugging with the very mention of Christmas.
The miser is inured to all the festivity around him, and the Rep makes sure there’s a lot. It populates the 10th Street stage with crowds prone to burst into seasonal harmony with a zeal that may encourage some to sing along.
“A Christmas Carol,” a fixture of the Toledo holiday season, is be staged on the Tenth Street Stage at the Tenth Street Stage, 16th Tenth St., in Toledo.
Showtimes are Friday, Dec. 6 and Saturday, Dec. 7 at 2:30 and 8 p.m. and Sunday, Dec. 8 at 2:30 p.m. continuing Dec. 12-14 at 8 p.m. with 2:30 p.m. matinees on Dec. 14 and Dec. 15. Click for tickets.
Jeffrey Albright directs the masses on stage, whipping up Christmas spirit that even “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner” like Scrooge will eventually succumb to. That’s not before the intervention of various spirits and mortals.
So many of us know these regular holiday visitors well.
Fred (Garrett Monasmith) is the ever-hopeful nephew who visits his uncle to invite him to dinner, only to be rebuffed with talk of people being boiled in pudding and hearts impaled with stakes of holly.
There’s long-suffering and shivering clerk Cratchit (Mark Owen) who just wants to get home to celebrate with his family, only to be told to “be here all the earlier the next morning” when asking for Christmas off.
Indeed lines like this ring as familiar tropes.
When Marley (Gary Insch) shows up to inform Scrooge about how the hauntings will unfold, he tells his surviving partner: “I wear the chain I forged in life. … I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.” Insch provides a particularly scary Marley.
The presence of a number of children in the audience on opening night Thursday was a reminder this is a ghost story and meant to be scary. Their elders may have been through this drill before, but the youngsters are lucky enough still to be scared. I know how the image of Alastair Sim facing his headstone in the 1951 film is burned into my imagination.
The various spirits arrive as required.
Lydia Schafer is both wistful and stern as the spirit who reintroduces Scrooge to his past. That includes a raucous holiday gathering overseen by Old Fezziwig (Denny Corathers) and the scene where the young Scrooge’s fiancée Belle (Erin Cisneros) she breaks up with him (Tyler Yard). She understands that the avarice that has taken root, yet the elder Scrooge is already softening.
Michael Schmitz is quite the jolly Ghost of Christmas Present who guides Scrooge through all his missing out on — the party at Fred’s and the dinner at Cratchits where we get to meet Tiny Tim (Anderson Linares on opening night). Tim, of course, has them most famous line of the tale:“God Bless, Us Everyone), though in this production it is a toast first by Cratchit.
Yard returns within a heaping pile of shrouds that is the Ghost of Christmas Future.
Chris LaPorta, Jake Spencer, and Scott Dibling play out one of the creepiest scenes where Scrooge’s personal belongings are divvied up and sold off, including his best night shirt stripped by his corpse.
Scrooge confronts his grave stone and then, a changed man confronts those he has wronged, and hoists Tiny Tim to his shoulder. Let the Christmas season begin.
