Acacia delivers a stirring ‘Carol’ variation
Poor Jacob Marley. Worse for wear and dragging all those chains around, he’s tasked with scaring Scrooge straight, even though he himself gets no such second chance. Scrooge discovers the reason for the season. Marley stays in hell.
So much for Dickens’ version. Having embodied Ebenezer for seven seasons, Tom Mula wrote “Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol,” an ingenious variation in which Marley is promised salvation if he saves Scrooge’s soul. It’s now being enacted by a fab-four cast with Acacia Theatre Company, under Elaine Wyler’s direction.
Presented in story theater format, this foursome both narrates and plays all the roles. Simply clad in black, they work on a bare-bones set — a few ladders and sticks of furniture — with almost no props. The result is good oldfashioned storytelling.
As things begin, a dead Marley (David Sapiro) is called to account in hell’s antechamber by a droll bookkeeper (Tim Rebers), who has way too much fun telling this onetime skinflint that his moral account is badly in arrears. Marley is given until dawn to erase his debts by rescuing Scrooge (Derrion Brown, channeling Eddie Murphy). If Marley fails, he stays in hell forever.
Lighting designer Dan Hummel and sound designer Therese Goode leave no doubt that this isn’t a place Marley wants to be. We hear the harrowing cries of the damned, flitting like shadows against a fiery orange backdrop framing a dark and cavernous stage. Saving a miser like Scrooge may be a tall order. Hanging out in hell is far worse.
Wracked with despair as he ponders his daunting assignment, Marley gets encouragement from an impish Bogle — part Tinker Bell, part guardian angel and part Puck — urging him to use his imagination and come up with a plan.
Claire Zempel’s Bogle — astringently funny rather than cloyingly cute — clearly cares for her charge. But she has little patience for his whining, and she’s too aware of what’s at stake to be silly. Once again, this rising young actor — still just a high school junior, despite years of stage experience — suggests an old soul.
Marley both needs such wisdom and profits from it; in Sapiro’s capable hands, he grows from a self-centered ninny into a man. Some of Marley’s backstory is overwritten; Mula is no Dickens. But this “Carol,” played by this cast, makes for a stirring journey into the light.
“Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol” continues through Dec. 3 at Concordia University’s Todd Wehr Auditorium, 12800 N. Lake Shore Drive, Mequon. Visit www.acaciatheatre.com/. Read more about this production at TapMilwaukee.com.