Wednesday, November 24, 2004
Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival presents Jacob Marley's Christmas Carol
By Allyson Jacob
For the past three years, Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival (CSF) has been presenting Tom Mula’s Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol, a one-man show adapted by Mula for the company that tells the classic story of Scrooge and his inner turmoil through the eyes of Jacob Marley, Scrooge’s deceased business partner.
Mula was inspired to craft the script after playing Scrooge for several years in productions of A Christmas Carol. As the story goes, during the second part of the play, Scrooge himself doesn’t have a whole lot to do, so while he was watching the meanderings of the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, Mula begin wondering what Marley would have thought of Scrooge following his untimely demise. Thus, Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol was born.
The script that CSF has been performing was adapted by Mula specifically for CSF. As writers are wont to do, Mula made additional changes to Marley following the adaptation he wrote for the company; those changes appear in the published version of Marley. It is this published version that CSF will tackle this season, beginning Wednesday, Dec. 1 and running through Thursday, Dec. 23.
Matt Johnson, a member of CSF’s Core Company, takes over the directing reins for this season’s production. He freely admits that he prefers the published version of the script to the older version the company had been using. “Mula took out a lot of narration,” Johnson explains. “[In doing so,] the script is much more playable. The script itself is broken up a little differently now, to integrate other actors. It’s an ensemble piece and it’s much more fun.”
The story begins seven years after the death of Scrooge’s business partner, Jacob Marley. Marley finds himself facing the Record Keeper in the afterlife and is offered one chance to save himself from a wretched eternity. He has twenty-four hours to transform Scrooge’s miserly heart. With the help of his spiteful celestial guide Bogle, Marley plots to convert his old partner. This season’s ensemble includes Giles Davies and Jeremy Dubin as Jacob Marley and The Bogle, who will share the stage again after successfully doing so in Love’s Labors Lost this season and Waiting for Godot, among others. Davies and Dubin will be joined by Sylvester Little Jr., a current Core Company member, as the Record Keeper and Jeffrey Rice, a current member of the Young Company, as Scrooge.
Instead of an evening of reader’s theatre, CSF patrons will be treated to a piece that Johnson calls “acrobatic and much more fun.” The newer version also cuts 30 minutes from the running time of the play; in an age where attention spans are growing ever shorter, cutting extraneous minutes from a show can only be a good thing.
Johnson also believes that he and the design team have tightened the show in other ways—by cutting sound cues, for one. In past productions of Marley, he found a plethora of cues that Johnson believes didn’t do a whole lot for the show as a whole. “It was actually a comment during an audience talkback that inspired the cutting of the cues,” he states. Most of the sound will be performed live on stage, as opposed to being played back during the production. “The show then becomes more about imagination rather than externalization,” Johnson concludes.
Though Johnson has directed before for CSF—he helmed the touring production of Romeo and Juliet and guided a production for the Cincinnati Fringe Festival—Marley will be Cincinnati audiences’ first time to see his work on the CSF mainstage. Knowing that he is treading on sacred CSF ground makes him a little anxious, but Johnson is confident that his creativity and ability to work with the cast and crew will make this season’s Marley a success. “Living up to the quality of the productions that have come before is definitely a big challenge,” he explains. “Filling those shoes. I’m definitely a different director. But I feel very confident that we will live up to the expectation.”
As for the buzz that 2004 will be the final time CSF produces Marley, Johnson doesn’t feel he has the authority to comment. “I’m not privy to those decisions,” he says. “Everybody does Christmas shows around this time. If the audience demands it, we’ll bring it back. We want to explore what else is back there.” Johnson pauses for a moment. “Again, I’m not privy to that decision.”
Bottom line? If patrons like what they see, they’ll need to lobby Brian Isaac Phillips, artistic director for CSF, and the rest of the managerial team to ensure that their voices are heard. After all, ‘tis hardly the season to be a Scrooge and deny folk their holiday pleasure.
Allyson Jacob is a freelance writer and playwright living just outside of Cincinnati.
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