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Peer Reviews
A
Christmas Carol Reviewed by Cory Vaughn Entire contents are copyright © 2008 Cory Vaughn. All rights reserved.
It's always interesting to see how different theatres, or even different creative forces, tackle a familiar property and try to make it their own, and Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol gets produced a lot this time of year. I myself have seen numerous productions, in many different venues, performed at varying levels of experience. Yet even taken by itself, without comparisons to any of the myriad other productions, I still feel that Washington County Actors Community Theatre could have given it a little more effort. To be fair, the company cannot do much to animate
the sub-par stage adaptation they've been handed.
Romulus Linney's flat and humorless treatment tries
and fails to fuse Dickens' prose with modern psychological
mumbo-jumbo, resulting in schizophrenia of tone
and purpose, and rendering Scrooge's journey of
self-discovery simply unbelievable. He succeeds in getting good performances out of some of his actors, most notably Mark Carter as miserable old Scrooge. It is a fact of theatrical life that any dramatization of Carol, whether on stage or film, depends on its leading man, and Mr. Carter is a fine anchor, reliably hitting the marks of sarcasm and pathos when necessary. He's also the only one who gets the accent right most of the time! The other key performance is an understated one by Daniel Main, who permeates the gloom as long-suffering clerk Bob Cratchit; the inconsolable grief he suffers in Scrooge's vision of a dismal possible Christmas Future is the real catharsis here, and provides the only genuine emotion of the evening. The supporting cast is rather weak, I'm afraid. A few actors, like Steve Brewer as Marley and Taylor Kearschner as Scrooge's jilted fiancée, impress me as having promise and can be so much better in these roles with just a bit more polish. Among the multiple tertiary actors, Dale Hottle, in an all-too-brief turn as a despicable Fagin-like character near the end of the play, is a standout as the sole successful comic relief.
A Christmas Carol Starring: Mark G. Carter, Daniel Main, Steve Brewer, Kayla Spurgeon, Aaron Johnson, Taylor Kearschner, Robert Deirth, Harrison Nicholson and Dale Hottle P.O. Box 188 Presented in the Salem Middle School Auditorium Tickets: $8 for Adults, $6 Students
Posted Dec. 8, 2008
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