I did try to review Meadow Brook Theatre’s A Christmas Carol once, shortly after launching The Rogue Critic. Still largely under the radar, I enjoyed the comfort of anonymity as I stood listening to the period-dressed carolers sing “In the Bleak Midwinter,” a lovely tentative carol that I only ever encounter here in this very lobby.
Whoever said “You can’t go home again” never knew a play that barely changed one iota over a thirty-year span.
We are an equal-opportunity family: some arts, some sports. Despite my penchant for the former and my brother’s preference for the latter, we generally engage in these activities all together. This year he is nearly seven, and I have just turned nine; we are old enough for family Christmas entertainment. The activity of choice is A Christmas Carol at a theater close to our Bloomfield Township home.
He sits respectfully; I am utterly rapt. Onstage, Scrooge is well on his way to repentance, lamenting that he would give all the wealth in the world to have a meager but happy family like that of his sweet lost Belle. The Ghost of Christmas Past’s work is complete. The curtain falls.
Intrigued, my brother wonders aloud if this is "halftime." Mom makes a silent New Year’s resolution: less sports, more arts.
Some of the actors I recognize from previous years of Carol, but the familiar face playing Fred is eschewing my recognition. I must have seen him somewhere before, but the specifics escape me. At intermission, I turn to the actor’s biography in the program. Apparently, I saw and reviewed him for the first time just weeks earlier, in Evil Dead: The Musical.
It strikes me as pretty funny that the reason I didn’t make the connection is because he didn’t have a chainsaw for a hand.
This year, Meadow Brook Theatre celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of A Christmas Carol. The play is as old as I am. (Well, almost.)
The late Charles Nolte adapted and staged his incomparable vision of Charles Dickens’s novella for Meadow Brook Theatre’s 1981 season. Resident stage manager Terry W. Carpenter was with the production from its inception, acting as stage manager for its entire thirty years, past and present, and now directs as well. The show was expected to be a one-off, like any other. When vociferous patron demand warranted an unexpected revival, the crew and designers carefully split apart delicate temporary set pieces and created new costumes with big seam allowances for year-to-year cast changes. Now, visually, almost nothing moves or changes from one season to another. Even the staging follows the same flow Nolte dictated three decades ago. And why shouldn’t it? I cannot conceive of a universe in which this production can be improved upon.
I’ll grant that not every patron feels the same closeness to the play as I do, but there is some magic in this. An artistic and commercial success that exhibits no diminishing returns for thirty years is lightning in a bottle.
My fifth-grade class is informed that we will have a field trip to see A Christmas Carol at Meadow Brook. I cease to behave rationally as they hand out the permission slips. Someone from the theater comes to talk to us about the production, and I raise my hand like a budding know-it-all Rogue, asking a question about the spectacular pyrotechnic effect that marks the end of Jacob Marley’s visit. Just, you know, a production-specific tidbit that ought to tip off our presenter that I’m no average viewer, but a totally savvy theater expert who has seen the play all of twice.
(To the best of my recollection, I also ask where the set is kept during the year. Possibly in case I wanted to go visit it.)
When I bring the permission slip home to my parents, their brows furrow in concern. The field trip is set for the Friday afternoon just before Christmas. We’ve had our tickets for the annual family outing for months already, and the thing is, honey, our tickets are for the Friday evening performance of the same day. With some hesitation, they spell it out that I’ll have to see A Christmas Carol twice in one day.
My parents apparently believe that I will construe this news as bad.
It was the best day ever.
Because I no longer have delusions of reviewing Carol, I decide to bring a guest. My companion has never seen the play, and she murmurs excited reactions and substantiates my enduring devotion. We can’t wait to go to dinner and talk about it.
“The Ghost of the Future was really pretty scary,” says my guest.
My personal aversion to scary, spooky things is fairly well documented on this site. No doubt the young Rogue needed some encouragement during her first encounter with the towering, gliding visage of the Ghost of Christmas Future. Now, I find this is one of the greatest perks of knowing the people onstage.
”Really?” I laugh. “All I see is my friend taking teeny little careful steps. It’s hilarious.” I briefly mimic the shuffle-creep of a vision-obscured actor trying not to wipe out on stilts. She looks at me with more than a little pity.
There’s a reason why you can’t go home again: it hurts. Physically. Your throat swells with nostalgia; you wonder whether you’ll choke, and if the carolers making their way down the aisle will keep singing “Here We Come A-wassailing” as they tend to you. You silently beg and beg for the house lights to fade because the way the curtain bounds straight up and into the story makes your eyes sting so irrationally. You can’t singularly concentrate on the play in front of you when line readings and gestures from 20 years ago echo in your head. You watch the entire production layered over all the other times you've watched it — they’re inseparable. They stretch back in a continuous line and reach home, and you drink in the play the way you did as a child, each production shocking and marvelous and better than the last. You leave the theater grimacing with a joy migraine. You try for weeks to write critic words.
You call your mother.
”Mom, I don’t know what to write about the show. I don’t know what to say. I don't think I can review it.”
”Then write about that,” Mom says.
Date: November 17, 2011
From: The Rogue Critic
To: Travis Walter, Artistic Director, Meadow Brook Theatre
Hi Travis,
I'm pretty sure I wrote to you last year to express the same thing, but I thought I'd send a refresher.
The truth is, I can't possibly review Meadow Brook's A Christmas Carol because I know it too well and love it too much. I don't have any distance from the production, nor would I want to.
So, Carolyn-me looks forward to attending once again as a patron, and Rogue-me looks forward to catching up with the rest of MBT's season in January. And both of us look forward to informing you of this anew next year.
Happy holidays!
The Rogue
After moving back to the Chicago suburbs, we have an urgent need for another Christmas Carol. We choose a big expensive production at a big expensive theater in downtown Chicago. When reminded of this also-ran production, to this day Mom cannot supply details, but can only emphatically repeat: "It was horrible. Oh, it was horrible."
Around us, all the Chicagoans think that what they are watching is something special, poor souls. But we have seen the real thing — we know from something special. We never go back.
Divine providence and the slow summer season has left me a July weekend free of play openings, which lets me attend my cousin’s wedding without any scheduling rigamarole. We’re passing time between the ceremony and reception; naturally, we are at Panera, as has been apparently decreed for all things Rogue. Dawdling, overdressed, I fade out from the family conversation and play with my phone.
Sometimes people send me nice messages if they like what I’ve written. The opposite also happens. Both are welcome. Now, I have a brief note from someone I’ve seen onstage many times, but never met; he thanks me for the review of his latest show. The message itself is not the extraordinary thing, but the sender makes my heart leap.
I interrupt. This is interruption-level news. "Mom! Omigod Mom. I just got a Facebook message from Scrooge."
Mom's eyes immediately widen. "Oh, cool."
Thomas D. Mahard will step onto the Meadow Brook stage as Ebenezer Scrooge tonight, December 23, 2011, for the final performance of the thirtieth anniversary season. This is his third year in the role, but his connection to the production spans twenty-seven years. Tonight is his one thousand, one hundred twenty-fifth performance in A Christmas Carol.
This November, via private message, Tom asked me why I wouldn’t review A Christmas Carol. I clarified that it wasn’t “wouldn’t” so much as “couldn’t,” but assured him that I would be in the audience on December 17. He said he’d like to hear why not sometime, and invited me on a backstage tour.
I lost my mind more than a little bit. At the show, I stashed a tin of homemade cookies under my seat to give to the cast. Some critic.
Backstage, like opening a box of old toys, I am confronted by the vestiges of my vivid memory, the recollections shifting to meet the real properties and set pieces in front of me. I’ve never seen them this close before. Baskets laden with plastic fruit and piles of wrapped packages fused together to be a single set piece, and oh, the rotating/reversing/folding wonder of Scrooge’s big old house. Instead of asking me why not, Tom simply asks when was the first year I saw the play. In the late 80s he was probably playing Old Joe, the underworld barnacle from the future vision who buys the dead Scrooge’s effects from the people who swiped them. When his daughter was two years old, he would bring her onstage hoisted on his shoulders as she tugged his hair. On the day of my tour, she is returning from college for break. Now, I love this production so much it keeps me from breathing, and in all honesty I still need just two hands to count the number of times I’ve seen it. Tom has me outnumbered more than a hundred-fold. I wonder if his affection for it can be similarly exponential. Unprompted, as if on cue, he tells me, “The thing is, I wouldn’t do this for so many years if I didn’t love it.”
Me, too. The count this year is one hundred fifty-five plays. One hundred fifty-five times a year I feel something like what I felt as a nine-year-old girl. Nobody would do that if they didn't love it.
What makes this Christmas Carol special to me is not its holiday magic, but how it uniquely stamped itself on my DNA and became part of me. The opportunity to return to such a founding childhood experience, to revisit it in the flesh year upon year, is nothing short of a treasure. To think about how many other kids — even adults that I watch in Michigan theaters today — got their start in theater because they unreservedly loved a play like this one from the very first, well, that makes it something else, a communal spirit that speaks to the depth as well as the breadth of the passion engendered by the performing arts. To review that would be to dissect a memory, to tether and explain away something as ethereal and precious as a dream.
The greeting is for everyone, wishing you all a restorative year’s end before striking up again in 2012 with exciting new theatrical pursuits. But in a very personal way, my gratitude is to the play of my childhood, and to the many people who have labored to give me and so many others this gift every year, and most of all to Tom for understanding. Thank you, sir. Bless you, sir. Merry Christmas, sir.