While Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” has been adapted into everything from a Muppets film to a Halloween-themed episode of “Roseanne” in productions too numerous to count, few retellings grasp the social commentary of the source material.
“We are so far removed from the suffering Dickens was forcing his readers to witness, that it is hard for us to imagine it,” says San Francisco Mime Troupe’s Michael Gene Sullivan, who adapted the tale for “A Red Carol,” a Mime Troupe premiere opening Dec. 14 in San Francisco.
“… The story and history have been sanitized into a feel-good tale of the one greedy man redeemed rather than the frightening challenge thrown in the faces of a self-congratulatory audience. ‘A Christmas Carol’ was a ‘scared straight’ story about shared humanity that has been reduced to a cash-cow, allowing the audience off the hook because they themselves are not as bad as Scrooge,” he adds.
“A Red Carol,” also directed by Sullivan, combines the Mime Troupe’s trademark leftist ideals with meta commentary explaining the meaning behind the “Bah, humbug!” tropes locked in public consciousness. Instead of a cliché retelling celebrating Scrooge’s redemption, it’s a condemnation of the capitalist system that gave Scrooge obscene wealth as the impoverished Cratchits struggled to keep warm.
Sullivan started the adaptation over a decade ago, and its first staged reading was in 2010. It’s gone through numerous drafts, more staged readings (the latest at EXIT on Taylor in 2022), and was turned into a radio play accessible on the Troupe’s website.
But this “power to the people” version always was meant to be given a proper stage production.
“I wanted to create a small-cast/easy-to-produce adaptation, to take back Dickens’ activist story for progressive, activist theaters,” Sullivan says. “The radio version gave me the space to use a large cast, and work with actors around the country in addition to San Francisco Mime Troupe veterans. But as much fun as that recording still is, the goal was always to put the adaptation onstage.”
Like the Mime Troupe’s annual summer shows in parks, it will be a musical (with scoring by Daniel Savio) balancing cartoonish performances with biting social critique. Although it won’t be presented outdoors due to weather (“If we were in Australia, and Christmas was in the summer, we would have done it in the park years ago!” says Sullivan), the show retains classic Troupe qualities.
“A Red Carol” embraces its source material’s darker elements.
“Dickens wrote ‘A Christmas Carol’ to scare the comfortable into seeing themselves as fortunate, not better, into seeing the humanity they shared with the less fortunate, and how their own blindness to that humanity is the problem. The real horror of the story is that we, the reader or audience, won’t act on that lesson. So, ‘A Red Carol’, like ‘A Christmas Carol,’ is only as frightening as the world it reflects,” Sullivan adds.
It also isn’t lost on Sullivan that “A Red Carol,” being staged at Z Space, a former factory, coincides with performances of traditional “upbeat” “Carols” around the city and world. Though “A Red Carol” is debatably family-friendly (“There’s no cussing, sex, or violence if that’s what you mean!”), Sullivan has reservations about attitudes of some potential audience members. He recalls a previous American Conservatory Theater “Carol” in which he appeared as The Ghost of Christmas Past and was collecting post-show contributions in the lobby for an AIDS charity when he heard one patron say, “How dare they ask for donations after a show like this!”
“They had completely missed the entire damn point! That’s when I started thinking about ‘A Red Carol,’” Sullivan says.
Sullivan acknowledges some difficulty in promoting the new show: “Our audience is not used to us producing in the winter, and many progressives are so used to thinking of Dickens as sentimental crap, that it is a hill to climb to trust us when we say, ‘This is not that!’”
Answering a 2024 presidential-election themed query about whether any ghost could change the heart and mind of a proverbial Scrooge, Sullivan replies, “Some politicians are so irredeemable that no ghost, no spirit, no god, or demon could shake their iron-clad narcissistic delusion. They speak lies into vicious truths, fantasies into horrible realities, and their self-faith is so ingrained they could not exist without it. The only thing that frightens the powerful into being better people is the threat of revolution.”
San Francisco Mime Troupe’s premiere of “A Red Carol” runs Dec. 14 through Dec. 29 at Z Space, 450 Florida St., San Francisco. Tickets are $20-$50 at sfmt.org.
Charles Lewis III is a San Francisco-born journalist and performer. He has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, KQED, the San Francisco Examiner, and more. Dodgy evidence of this can be found at The Thinking Man’s Idiot.wordpress.com.
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