Let’s begin by answering the burning question: no, for the first time in 40-plus years, the Scrooge of South Coast Repertory’s “A Christmas Carol” did NOT do a somersault into his top hat in his reborn zeal to spread cheer.
This Scrooge did, however, gleefully delight at finding an updated black hat, one with a cheery, bright red band and a design motif of miniature fanciful Christmas figurines.
With this behind us, we can get to the notable major change in this perennial seasonal chestnut returned to the Orange County Christmas calendar: if not the torch, the passing of the hat from the methuselah Ebenezer Scrooge, actor Hal Landon Jr., who retired from the role in 2019 after 40 years, to another worthy SCR acting warhorse, the eternally ebullient and energizing Richard Doyle.
Beyond the welcome familiarity of the production — the group scenes with 20-plus actors of all ages landed during Friday night’s opening night with special resonance given how bare our stages have been these past couple years — the key question was who Doyle’s Scrooge would be?
Over 36 consecutive seasons of appearing in SCR’s staging, Doyle has had every opportunity to observe the role in real time, at the closest proximity.
The actor has played many of the supplemental key characters, including Scrooge’s first employer Fezziwig, his nephew Fred, the Spirit of Christmas Past and each of the two solicitors.
And beyond that, Doyle’s well-thought-out rendering likely stems from an affinity for the piece that stretches even further back across the decades.
In 1954, when Doyle was 9 years old, it was the first play he ever saw live.
The clearest way to convey Doyle’s portrayal is to examine it through the three faces of Scrooge in this theatrical version of the tale: cranky-pants Scrooge; theme-park visitor Scrooge; reborn Scrooge.
While capable of spitting out “bah, humbugs” of bitter dismissal with the best of ‘em, Doyle early on in both the street and his office lair stresses a bull-headed and earnest logic driving Scrooge’s misanthropy.
At the root of it, he is downright peeved to his core by the sheer irrationality of all this Yuletide good feeling, opposite in every way from his single-minded, hard-bitten impulses and endeavors.
Doyle’s rancorous dismissal of charity do-gooders, clerk Cratchit and nephew Fred is virtually Henry Higgins-like, a monomaniacal ego wondering “why can’t the poor be more like me?”
The least showy of the Scrooges is when, largely mute, he is led around the stage to take a tour of the tableaus of his past, current and possible future life.
Doyle’s Ebenezer, it seemed, establishes here early on a surprising almost openness and willingness to potentially rethink his character’s evil ways.
Much of this stretch is through mime, with a quality of plaintive self-questioning through the actor’s body language and facial gestures, as if he were undergoing a wonderment of “so that is how I got this way.”
Happy Scrooge is clearly in Doyle’s natural wheelhouse, allowing him to radiate animation and fellowship, invariably one of the actor’s appeals. But striking here in charting Scrooge’s emotional growth is Doyle’s deeply displayed humility for his past self and treatment of others when he attends Fred’s Christmas party.
The hugs at play’s end that Doyle’s Scrooge shares with Fred and his wife Sally are those given by a true believer in kindness and feeling.
With about 50 cast members, it’s impractical to single out many performances, but a few faces of note beyond Doyle include:
Another SCR Founding Member still in the cast is Art Koustik, whose company pedigree includes dozens of roles over the years beyond being in the original 1980 production of “Carol.”
Koustik’s main presence here is as Joe, a street-scene constant whose benign presence as a cider vendor masks a more unsavory quality of bartering in stolen items. Joe’s decrying of Scrooge’s miserly ways early on is tellingly offset later by Kustik’s cynical hoot of glee at being presented with Scrooge’s silk shirt in the always compelling “Scavenger” scene, which eternally channels MacBeth’s three witches.
For sheer delight in befuddlement and kerfuffle-hood, actors William Francis McGuire and Melody Butiu have worked up, likely with director Hisa Takakuwa, a symphonia of double-takes of horror, flustered squawks and “well, I nevers!” in reaction to the miserly Scrooge balefully rejecting them when they are trying to gather Yuletide donations for the less fortunate.
Even after they flee his office, perfectly-mic’d offstage we continue to hear their dismay, the duo making non-word noises like troubled little forest creatures as they scuttle away.
In what might be another first for the production, the Spirit of Christmas Past is played by a woman. Jennifer Parsons’ gray and silver tinsel garb and kind demeanor render this tour guide of Scrooge’s early years as something of a benign fairy godmother.
Another new ghostly presence is burly Richard Soto as the Spirit of Christmas Present, who last appeared in the role 20 years ago. His countenance is sort of a latter-day Bacchus; sporting a flowered garland, he nudges Scrooge to see the possibilities of letting the good times roll.
From the size of the drinking flagon he airily waves about, Soto’s ghost’s aging 30 years from the end of Act 1 through the intermission and the start of Act 2 seems quite understandable.
The always exemplary lighting design for this 41st season is again the vision of Donna and Tom Ruzika. The couple — the only lighting czars this production has ever known — have been married for 49 years.
One other programing note: In addition to this month’s 25 remaining performances, this production will return for a last time in 2022.
An entirely new production, underwritten in large part from a $5 million donation by philanthropist Julianne Argyros in late 2019, originally intended to premiere this year and then in 2022, is now scheduled to finally be unveiled in 2023.
‘A Christmas Carol’
Rating: 3 stars
Where: Segerstrom Stage, South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa
When: Through Dec. 26; 7:30 p.m, Tuesdays-Fridays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Saturdays, noon and 4 p.m. Sundays. Additional performances at noon and 4 p.m. Friday, Dec. 24
Tickets: $34-$84
Information: 714-708-5555; scr.org
