A Christmas Carol - through Dec. 23, 2012
Citadel Theatre, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
As adapted by Tom Wood, Directed by Bob Baker and Geoffrey Brumuk
Ticket information at Citadel Theatre

Nothing is quite such a Christmas classic as Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

And in Edmonton, nothing has become more of a Christmas classic than Tom Wood’s stage adaptation of A Christmas Carol for the Citadel Theatre.

A Christmas Carol premiered 13 years ago. The initial year was an herculean effort that darned near killed everybody. the huge production was mounted in six short weeks, as technically complicated and as artistically vast as theatre can get and all done for the first time. No matter. A Christmas Carol was an artistic and box-office triumph from opening night on.

A Christmas Carol was designed to be an annual event – it had to run for a few years if only to recover its production costs – but nobody expected it’d be so popular as to continue, non-stop, for 13 Christmas seasons!

I confess, I am in love with this show, and  am probably one of the few in Edmonton who has never missed a year of this Christmas Carol.

After 13 years, the sheer scope of this show has been taken forgranted. Thirty-seven actors (including 16 youth), 52 roles, at least 20 scenes and a running time of two hours and 15 minutes.  

This Christmas Carol is the perfect marriage of the power of story/script  to the imagination of theatre. It is a whirling dervish of magical set changes before our very  eyes, of theatrical tricks to reinforce the story, of a beautiful constancy of rhythm and movement and mood. 

Carried out at the highest of standards, This production of A Christmas Carol keeps getting better and better. It's as magical and emotional and a tribute to the power of the human imagination as ever. It’s not just a good story line, it’s epic on all levels.

Within the finery is an intimate story – of Ebenezer Scrooge, a man so parched of soul  and so smitten by the material world,  that Christmas is a humbug until the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future inform him of the error or his ways. Alongside Scrooge's story is that of Scrooge's employee's crippled son Tiny Tim, his family and Scrooge's kind nephew Fred.

Part of the allure of the Citadel’s show is the richness of the backstage acting "family" that expands with each passing year.

With the annual re-mounting of the show every year, certain actors are so right for certain roles that they happily return year after year. Julian Arnold has been the beloved Bob Cratchit for 12 of those 13 years, Maralyn Ryan has played blustery Mrs. Dilber for most of those years, Kate Ryan is the beautiful Mrs. Cratchit, and Ashley Wright as the booming Ghost of Christmas Present and Mr. Fezziwig. One cannot imagine anyone else in those roles!

Other veterans in at least their third or fourth or more Christmas Carols include April Banigan, Jeremy Baumung, Mich Cheladyn, Rejean Cournoyer, Annette Loiselle, Glenn Nelson and Roman Pfob.

Tom Wood took on the monstrous (in scope) lead role - Scrooge is rarely off-stage - for the first decade. The audience would have loved Wood to be Scrooge forever, had he not decided, as much for his health as any other reason, to move on.

Today, another Citadel favourite, associate director James MacDonald, has stepped effortlessly into Tom's shoes, bringing a different, but by no means lesser, interpretation to the role.

The back-stage experience - especially with 16 youth, many under 10 - takes on its own festive air as Christmas approaches, and can't help but be projected onto the stage. Such is the joy of this Christmas Carol. Out of the many children who have appeared in A Christmas Carol, at least 10 have been sufficiently bit by the acting bug as to evolve on into budding professional theatrical careers.  

Don't miss A Christmas Carol.  It represents all that is right and good about the Citadel, its acting family, the city's artistic community, Edmonton at large, and the power of live theatre to re-introduce us to those spaces within that make us so happy to be alive.

God bless us, everyone!  Merry Christmas!