Viewers join action in Christmas classic
When actor Campbell Scott goes to see a play, he’s not the type who wishes to get drawn into the action.
“I’m usually: Start the show, do the show, let me sit here,” said Scott, who sports snow-white muttonchops as Ebenezer Scrooge in a new production of “A Christmas Carol” on Broadway. “I really am that kind of audience member.”
He had to let go of that quickly for the buoyant, immersive interpretation of the holiday classic.
The adaptation, which opened at the Lyceum Theatre on Wednesday, shreds the gap between the audience and the action. Performers greet ticket-holders with cookies and clementines as musicians in Victorian garb warm up the place with seasonal melodies. And it only gets more communal from there.
When it snows on stage, it snows in the seats. (It’s soap.) When it’s time to put together a feast, the audience isn’t spared. And when cast members break out in a carol, as happens from time to time, faces in the crowd murmur along, too.
Morose at moments, the uptempo two-hour play is still a gentler pill than many renditions of Charles Dickens’ 176-year-old yarn.
An arrival from London, the adaptation first appeared at the West End’s Old Vic Theater two years ago. It makes its mark on the Great White Way with a high-tech set conjured by Tony winner Rob Howell with lighting by Tony winner Hugh Vanstone. But the intimate character of the show makes it feel a bit like a neighborhood performance, aided by the cramped nature of Broadway’s oldest operating playhouse.
The stage itself is sparse, save for a few retracting door frames and Hogwartsian lamps that hang from the ceiling, flickering luminously.
“We wanted to do something which was trusting the audience’s imagination more, and not about us being clever,” Howell told the Daily News. “We tried to dig around to really find out what’s at the essence of it.
And at the essence of it is there’s a man who’s trapped in a cage. A cage of his own making.”
As in countless tellings past, the story grapples with a melancholy miser who spends the small hours of Christmas morning getting spooked into rethinking his misanthropy. Tony-winning playwright Jack Thorne, who penned the script for “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” adds a few wrinkles but largely sticks to form.
Scott is tasked with connecting with the crowd. After some nerves about wandering the aisles, he said his anxiety dissipated after the first preview.
He follows in the footsteps of his late father, actor George C. Scott, who took on the dour character in a 1984 film version of “A Christmas Carol.”
The challenge: moderating the many timbres of Scrooge’s personality as he flashes into the past and future. Scott portrays both the young and old Ebenezer and said the joyful Scrooge is harder to pull off.
“It’s easy to be mean,” the 58-year-old told The News with a laugh. “It’s not me. But it’s certainly easy to make that color. Because it’s fun. It’s also the one we know.”
The sullen Scrooge is also more tightly moored to the stage, tinkering with items he stuffs under the floorboards like emotions buried beneath hardened skin.
By the end of the show, plenty of tear-jerking touches are applied. As ever, the disabled but cheery child Tiny Tim packs a punch. He’s played by Jai Ram Srinivasan and Sebastian Ortiz, who alternate in the role.
But Scott said each audience brings a range of reactions. Different scenes resonate with different crowds; it’s not always Tiny Tim declaring, “God bless us, everyone!”
And Scott noted that his own emotions also spike in changing scenes as he parades around the Lyceum. “It’s like running a half-marathon every night,” he said.
“I’m old me, and young me, and all that stuff. Which I love,” Scott said. “But it ain’t sitting on a couch and saying funny things.”