Whereas Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” has been tailored into all the pieces from a Muppets movie to a Halloween-themed episode of “Roseanne” in productions too quite a few to depend, few retellings grasp the social commentary of the supply materials.
“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 tailored the story 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 provides.
“A Red Carol,” additionally directed by Sullivan, combines the Mime Troupe’s trademark leftist beliefs with meta commentary explaining the which means behind the “Bah, humbug!” tropes locked in public consciousness. As a substitute of a cliché retelling celebrating Scrooge’s redemption, it’s a condemnation of the capitalist system that gave Scrooge obscene wealth because the impoverished Cratchits struggled to maintain heat.
San Francisco Mime Troupe collective member Michael Gene Sullivan has been engaged on “A Red Carol” for years. (Courtesy Lisa Keating)
Sullivan began the variation over a decade in the past, and its first staged studying was in 2010. It’s gone by quite a few drafts, extra staged readings (the newest at EXIT on Taylor in 2022), and was was a radio play accessible on the Troupe’s web site.
However this “power to the people” model at all times was meant to be given a correct stage manufacturing.
“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.”
Just like the Mime Troupe’s annual summer season exhibits in parks, it will likely be a musical (with scoring by Daniel Savio) balancing cartoonish performances with biting social critique. Though it gained’t be offered outside resulting from climate (“If we were in Australia, and Christmas was in the summer, we would have done it in the park years ago!” says Sullivan), the present retains traditional Troupe qualities.
“A Red Carol” embraces its supply materials’s darker parts.
“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 provides.
It additionally isn’t misplaced on Sullivan that “A Red Carol,” being staged at Z House, a former manufacturing unit, coincides with performances of conventional “upbeat” “Carols” across the metropolis and world. Although “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 viewers members. He remembers a earlier American Conservatory Theater “Carol” through which he appeared as The Ghost of Christmas Previous and was accumulating post-show contributions within the foyer 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 problem in selling the brand new present: “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 question about whether or not any ghost may change the center and thoughts 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 by Dec. 29 at Z House, 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 extra. Dodgy proof of this may be discovered at The Pondering Man’s Fool.wordpress.com.
