"The pop-culture hallmarks of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" are ghosts, a boy on crutches and a mean old man. And while those are all central elements of the story, most people forget that the transformation of the most famous miser in literary history, Ebenezer Scrooge, hinges on an incident with a young caroler that Scrooge recalls fairly early in the 1843 novella. The key to the classic holiday tale - an actual Christmas carol - is right there in the name, and yet almost everyone overlooks it."
""We've been really deliberate about which Christmas carols we've chosen," Shepherd says. "Because there's such a long and rich history of carols, and so narrowing it down to, you know, the 15 or 16 that we wanted to actually use was a little more difficult. I mean, everyone has a favorite carol. And Charles and I, sitting down for the very first time, we started naming what carols are our favorites, or that we think belong in the show, even if we don't necessarily know where they belong in the show"
Santa Cruz Shakespeare's staging of A Christmas Carol runs through Dec. 24 at the Veterans Memorial Building in Santa Cruz and integrates more than a dozen Christmas carols, about half new this year. Mike Ryan appears as Ebenezer Scrooge in an elegant stage adaptation by Charles Pasternak that remains remarkably faithful to Dickens' 1843 novella. The production highlights the pivotal role of a Christmas carol in Scrooge's transformation and foregrounds music as a central element. Luke Shepherd, a UCSC music lecturer who calls himself "a Christmas carol nerd," serves as music director. Shepherd and Pasternak selected fifteen to sixteen carols deliberately from a long history of carols to enhance narrative and emotional resonance throughout the show.
Read at The Mercury News
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