Xmas present
Current events resonate in ACT's otherwise upbeat adaptation of Dickens's A Christmas Carol.

By Robert Avila

STEVEN ANTHONY JONES returns for a second season as titanic tightwad and Noel nixer Ebenezer Scrooge in American Conservatory Theater's 25th annual production of A Christmas Carol. It's probably fair to say that Scrooge faces a certain amount of competition this year from a world gone pretty mean itself, but Jones gives the competition a run for its money. Refashioning the spindly lickpenny of theatrical tradition into a hulking, growling menace, Jones stalks the show with a lumbering gait, decked out in a miser's frowsy threads, a veritable cannon looking for an excuse to explode. His "Bah!" alone knocks back a petrified young caroler (Forrest Fraser Tiffany II) at least six inches before his "Humbug!" can land like a snowball on the child's kisser. He's a seriously scary Scrooge.

The more generally ingrained inequality and callous indifference Scrooge represents, aptly suggested by his sarcastic reply to two charitable women (Ali Baker and Margaret Schenck) collecting for the homeless – "Are there no jails? No workhouses?" he sneers – strike us as not very anachronistic. In fact, it makes one wonder if the 21st century will be all that different from the 19th.

Of course, Laird Williamson and Dennis Powers's adaptation of Charles Dickens's 1843 novella does little to encourage such gloomy thoughts (which come entirely courtesy of Dickens and the Bush administration) and instead favors the lavish Christmas window dressing suited to a perennial holiday family show. With original songs by Williamson and Lee Hoiby and an array of splendid costumes by Robert Morgan, the stage more than once erupts in yuletide revelry. Moreover, playing off of Jones's ferocious old cuss offers some nice comedic moments for director Craig Slaight and his enormous cast, composed of actors from ACT's master of fine arts and Young Conservatory programs as well as old hands Tommy A. Gomez, Brian Keith Russell, Schenck, and Rhonnie Washington. And while the spookier aspects of this haunted Christmas tale achieve visual perfection in Robert Blackman's baroque set, suggestive of a ghost-ridden attic, and Peter Maradudin's devilish underworld lighting, the show's heart is in the merrymaking.

Scrooge's own change of heart – brought about by the visitations of the four spirits who lay before him his past, present, and future – naturally brings the merriment to its pinnacle and the story to its happy moral, as a redeemed Scrooge radiates goodwill toward the world with all the force the misanthrope expended in turning away from it.

But between the production's more ghoulish aspects and its fa-la-la-la-lulling portions of Christmas cheer, the strongest effect comes not from Scrooge's redemption, let alone the thoroughly mawkish (if well played) subplot of the Cratchits and Tiny Tim (Chase Macauley Maxwell). It's in the flashes here and there of the author's moral indignation at the status quo, indignation that crystallized a decade or so later in Hard Times, Bleak House, and Little Dorrit, with their brilliant indictments of a dehumanizing industrial order. Of course, for Dickens, the flip side of redemption in spiritual terms is reform in social ones. Scrooge's ghost-guided confrontation with memory and mortality awakens a sense of membership in a community, which is beetter for the realization.

This intimate connection between conscience and the health of society is the "Ghost of an Idea" Dickens wanted to raise in the first place, of course, and makes it all the harder these days not to be impressed by his portrait of Ignorance (Daniel Patrick Kennedy) and Want (Michelle Roginsky) as two starving, ragged children clawing at the feet of Christmas Present (Russell). Or not to take the ghost (and the author) seriously when he tells Scrooge that these children belong to Man, and especially to beware the boy, Ignorance, "For on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it! Slander those who tell it ye. Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end." Those are the kinds of lines that make the eggnog just stick in your throat.

'A Christmas Carol' runs Wed/18-Sun/22, 7:30 p.m. (also Wed/18-Thurs/19 and Sat/21-Sun/22, 2 p.m.); Tues/24 and, Dec. 26-28, noon (also Tues/24, Dec. 26, and 28, 4:30 p.m.); Dec. 29, 2 p.m., Geary Theater, 415 Geary, S.F. $11-$61. (415) 749-2228.