Phillyist Reviews... A Christmas Carol

Disney has this remarkable ability to adapt classic fairy tales and works of literature, distill them down to their basic moral cores, slap a happy ending on the end where one might not belong, and make us forget how incredibly dark their source material is.

So it is with Mickey's Christmas Carol, and, to a certain extent, the now-Disney-owned Jim Henson Company's feature film, The Muppet Christmas Carol, the two interpretations of Dickens' cherished holiday tale that I remember most clearly from my childhood. These films get the core themes of the original story without any of the real nitty-gritty. And so you forget, or perhaps you never realize, how goddamn scary A Christmas Carol really is.

No fear, Mum Puppettheatre to the nightmare rescue!

Mum's remounted adaptation of A Christmas Carol by Bruce Graham is every bit as dark and creepy as the Victorian morality tale. More so, perhaps, because the Robert Smythe-directed production gives us visual representations of what is left, in the book, to the reader's imagination. One of the most stunningly effective examples of this comes early on in the play, when Scrooge (Gregg Almquist) turns the key in the lock of his door, and looking up, sees not the door knocker, but the face of his seven years-dead partner, Jacob Marley. For this effect, Mum utilizes a stretchy scrim-like material that Jered McLenigan, playing Marley's ghost along with nearly every other character in the play, stretches his head into, letting out a howl so pained that it, along with the effect of a face coming through the solid door, is immediately jarring to both the audience and to Scrooge.