During last year's lockdown, the Alabama Shakespeare Festival community could only download Greta Lambert's delightful one-person adaptation of the 1843 Charles Dickens novella, A Christmas Carol; this year, with all COVID protocols in place and enforced [thank you again ASF for doing your part to keep theatergoers safe], Ms. Lambert's live and in-person performance on the intimate Octagon stage will make you laugh and cry, but most of all exercise your imagination as you listen attentively to its pertinent messages of hope for humankind.
No stranger to editing other classics [witness the numerous brilliant adaptations of Shakespeare she has developed over the years], this 75-minute version of A Christmas Carol weaves its magic and engages audiences as Ms. Lambert brings to life its narrator and a myriad of familiar characters.
While most staged and filmed productions of A Christmas Carol emphasize spectacle [nothing wrong with that], the key to Ms. Lambert's remarkable performance is storytelling and staying true to her primary source. -- Yes, Ebeneezer Scrooge starts out as a "squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner" prone to exclaiming "Bah, humbug!" at the mere mention of Christmas, and through the intervention of the ghost of his "dead as a doornail" business partner Jacob Marley and visitations from the Ghosts of Christmases Past, Present, and Yet-to come, is reclaimed and ends up as a benevolent and generous man who possesses the true spirit of Christmas all the year long.
Ms. Lambert is so respectful of Dickens's composition that her judicious editing maintains the flow of the narrative and targets its important and essential moments. But there is more.
Dickens composed his masterpiece by dividing it into "Staves" [i.e. musical staffs] with such colorfully delicious words that Ms. Lambert speaks so eloquently, attending to the rhythms of speech and the vivid descriptions of places and characters, so that the music of the words is enhanced, and all our senses are engaged.
She invites us to visualize the details of Victorian London and such characters as the diminutive cripple Tiny Tim, the effervescent Mr. Fezziwig, and Scrooge's ever optimistic nephew Fred; we can almost taste the meager banquet at Bob Cratchitt's table and the opulent array of foods surrounding the Ghost of Christmas Present; we can smell the roasting chestnuts as well as Old Joe's dank backstreet shop; we shiver in the winter's cold and warm ourselves by a toasty fireside, and tremble along with Scrooge as he awaits his fate; we hear the crunch of footsteps in the snow and the joyous peal of church bells on Christmas morning. -- Truly, music to the ears of the opening night audience who were wrapt with attention to Ms. Lambert as she recounted Ebeneezer Scrooge's journey.
With nuanced direction by Rick Dildine, and with a set and lighting by Jeff Behm and sound design by Melanie Chen Cole that become the play's supporting characters without intruding on the narrative or performance, Ms. Lambert triumphs in her masterful version of A Christmas Carol, one which leaves us with hope for the future and a challenge to all of us to witness Tiny Tim's prayer: "God bless us, every one".
