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Kansas City's Online Journal of the Performing Arts

Ever since Charles Dickens’s novella first appeared in 1843, it has been impossible to imagine a Christmas season without A Christmas Carol. This weekend in Kansas City, there will be at least three distinctly different professional presentations of A Christmas Carol playing out simultaneously within a few miles of each other. And whether you prefer state-of-the-art stagecraft, appreciate hearing the story in its purest form, or have always believed Scrooge & Co. was more the stuff of musical comedy, there is an offering for you.

Kansas City Repertory Theatre is currently mounting its 31^st-annual production of A Christmas Carol. Last year’s 30^th-anniversary extravaganza was notable for all its technical upgrades—new projection design, new lighting design, and a reconstructed set on a 40-foot-diameter turntable. While the artistic team has not only fine-tuned and enhanced the theatrical aspects—keep a lookout for Jacob Marley’s entrance, not that you can miss it—this year’s production focuses more on the fact that this is at heart a dream play, a psycho-drama.

“When you can really nail some of these special effects, if you can channel that back in to the human story, that’s where the payoff is,” says Rep associate artistic director Kyle Hatley, who is directing Carol for the second time. “Though there is some flair to it, the idea is that it hopefully all comes back to Scrooge’s journey and transformation.”

The audience’s favorite moments, from the full-cast rendition of “O Come All Ye Faithful” to the twelve-foot-tall Ghost of Christmas Past wandering the aisles, are all still here, and Gary Neal Johnson is embodying Scrooge for the tenth time on the Rep stage in what Hatley believes is Johnson’s best performance yet. “He only pushes himself further every year,” the director says. “I feel I’ve discovered him more as I’ve discovered the play more. He’s astonishing.”

A few minutes drive away, Westport Center for the Arts will be renewing an annual tradition of its own, with a dramatic reading of Dickens’s original text. “It’s been over ten years, and we’ve lost track,” says WCA president Jeanne Murphy of the number of times she and other Kansas City actors have come together for what began as a project of Westport Presbyterian and Westport Cooperative Services as something of a fundraiser. [Murphy later confirmed the first reading took place in 1998.]

The WCA Live Readers’ Theatre presentation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is not a staged reading, but a complete “unstaging” of the story, Murphy says. Four actors take turns reading edited staves of the novella, playing all the roles in their respective sections. “This gets it down to ‘let’s tell a story,’” she says. “Let’s listen to how it was written, because it starts with the words.” Joining Murphy are Robert Gibby Brand (also a longtime veteran of the Rep’s A Christmas Carol), Jennifer Mays, and Tosin Morohunfola.

Meanwhile, Kansas City Young Audiences is enlivening the dark tale with some light-opera classics. A Gilbert & Sullivan Christmas Carol, as concocted by author Gayden Wren, recasts Dickens’s ghost story in the style of his musical-comedy contemporaries, with scenes set to music by Arthur Sullivan and with lyrics inspired by W.S. Gilbert. As the final production of its 50^th-Anniversary Season, KCYA is presenting the show in a “concert-style performance…fun for the whole family” with stage-and-screen veteran Kip Niven in the role of Scrooge and co-starring Deb Bluford as the Ghost of Christmas Present. Local author Andrea Warren will also be present before and after each performance to discuss and sign copies of her new book, Charles Dickens and the Street Children of London.

Whether you will be experiencing A Christmas Carol for the first or the 31^st time, there will likely be something novel about the encounter. “You always want to find what makes it new for right now,” the Rep’s Hatley says. “That’s the urgency behind this year’s production.”

Even the unvarnished words themselves reflect differently against the backdrop of the current world with each new reading. “Every time we do it, I get to hear the story again,” Murphy says. “And every time, I learn something new about the story. It’s never static.” 

PREVIEW:
Westport Center for the Arts
A Christmas Carol
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Westport Presbyterian Church
201 Westport Rd., Kansas City, MO
For tickets call 816-701-3481, ext. 3, or online at www.westportcenterforthearts.org

Kansas City Repertory Theatre
A Christmas Carol
Runs through December 26
Spencer Theatre, James C. Olson Performing Arts Center
UMKC Campus
4949 Cherry Street, Kansas City, MO
For tickets call 816-235-2700 or online at www.kcrep.org

Kansas City Young Audiences
A Gilbert & Sullivan Christmas Carol
Saturday, December 3, and Sunday, December 4
St. Teresa Academy Auditorium 
5600 Main St., Kansas City, MO
For tickets call 816-531-4022 or online at www.kcya.org

Top Photo: Gary Neal Johnson (Scrooge) in the Kansas City Repertory Theatre's A Christmas Carol. (Photo by Don Ipock)

By Victor Wishna

Senior Editor, Theatre; Theatre and Features Contributor
Victor Wishna is a writer, editor, and author, among other things. A graduate of Stanford University and the New School's creative writing MFA program, he has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Baltimore Sun, the Miami Herald, the Kansas City Star, Humanities, and other major magazines and newspapers. He contributes a weekly real estate feature to the New York Post and his column “Letter from New York” is syndicated nationally.

With photographer Ken Collins, he published In Their Company: Portraits of American Playwrights (Umbrage Editions, 2006), for which he conducted and edited interviews with 61 prominent stage writers including Edward Albee, August Wilson, Tony Kushner, Wendy Wasserstein, and many others. The book won a 2007 Independent Publisher Book Awards Silver Medal (www.intheircompany.com).

He has always maintained a love for theatre, as a writer, an audience member, and even an actor, appearing in several community and semi-professional productions. As an undergraduate, he studied acting and playwriting with Anna Deavere Smith, in addition to journalism and psychology (and not engineering or medicine).

After nearly 12 years in New York City, Victor recently returned to his hometown with his wife, Annie, also a K.C. native. When not writing for publication or pleasure, Victor is honing his stand-up routine, which he has performed at numerous clubs and special events around New York, the Midwest, and elsewhere. In June 2010, he was named New York’s second-funniest amateur Jewish comedian by The Jewish Week. Seriously.