San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Keeping the ‘Carol’ spirit alive
Cygnet co-founder Sean Murray has had a 45-year love affair with Charles Dickens’ Christmas novella
Sean Murray said he has lost count of how many times he has directed, adapted or starred in a stage production of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” But he does remember one thing very clearly. Ebenezer Scrooge, the book’s miserly Victorian moneylender, is the first role that Murray ever played onstage, and that experience ignited his love for theater. Back in the mid-1970s, he was a fledgling teen actor at Twin Peaks Middle School in Poway. Today, he’s the longtime artistic director and co-founder of San Diego’s Cygnet Theatre. Now, for the first time in many years, he is circling back to the role of Scrooge.
Murray stars in Cygnet’s new filmed version of “A Christmas Carol” that will be available for streaming Monday through Dec. 27. He wrote the new stage adaptation and also directed the solo show in which he plays all of the characters. It runs about 68 minutes.
For his new adaptation, Murray said he went back and reread Dickens’ original story. The 1843 novella has been one of his favorite books since his 20s, when he started performing regularly in San Diego Repertory Theatre’s annual productions of the play, which ran from its founding year in 1976 to 2005. Rep co-founder Doug “D.W.” Jacobs wrote most of those stage adaptations, and he always impressed upon his actors that it was much more than a just a holiday ghost story, Murray said.
“For me it all starts with the book. Doug Jacobs was all about taking it seriously and really understanding what Dickens was trying to do. I think he had a very big impact on me,” Murray said. “I love that book. I feel the equivalence for me is like a Shakespeare play. Every year you can find something new and relevant that touches you in a completely different way.”
In the prologue to the holiday tale, Dickens wrote that he was attempting to “raise the ghost of an idea.” Murray said the idea was that every person in a society has the responsibility to take care of each other, like fellow passengers to the grave.
“It was a protest book about activism,” Murray said. “He wrote it in response to child labor laws, and he was responding to a country that was having economic problems and old traditions were being swamped. Christmas was in danger of being forgotten.”
In writing his new adaptation, Murray said he’s especially moved by the section about the Ghost of Christmas Present advising Scrooge to take special heed of the boy called “Ignorance,” because on his brow the ghost sees “doom.” Murray said that reminded him of the people today who deny the existence of COVID-19 and refuse to wear masks.
The streaming Cygnet “Carol” was filmed in black and white, which Murray said lent itself well to a ghost story with its contrasts of shadows and light. It also has a soundtrack of Celtic fiddling by Sean Laperruque. What it doesn’t have is the special effects, puppetry and songs from the “Christmas Carol” productions that Murray has been staging for the past six years at Cygnet.
After starring in, and later directing, numerous “Christmas Carol” productions at San Diego
Rep, Murray started staging his own “Carol” shows at Cygnet. The first “Carol” at Cygnet was a 1940s radio-broadcast-style adaptation presented in 2012 and 2013. In 2014, Cygnet debuted Murray’s own fully staged musical version with an original score by Billy Thompson that has been presented ever since.
Because of his deep affection for “A Christmas Carol” and the show’s long history in San Diego, Murray said he couldn’t let this year go by without “A Christmas Carol.” That’s one reason why this is the first streaming production Cygnet has produced since the pandemic began.
“Before we started doing the show, I made sure San Diego Rep had finished its claim on the story. So it felt a little like the passing of a torch,” he said. “For me, I felt like I needed to continue that. I don’t want the torch to go out.”