A Christmas Carol
Opening Night: November 21, 2022
Theater: Nederlander Theatre
Website: www.achristmascarollive.com
The timeless tale of Ebenezer Scrooge comes to thrilling new life as Tony Award-winner Jefferson Mays plays over 50 roles in a virtuosic, master class of a performance that must be seen to be believed.
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November 21, 2022
Never appearing without purpose, Mays seems to occupy every inch of the performance space and populates the place as an ensemble consisting of himself. In contrast to the narrator’s engaging presence, for instance, was Scrooge’s palpable loneliness, which made me take pause and contemplate it with a new understanding.
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November 21, 2022
This “Carol” is a breathless entertainment. Is breathing such a bad thing? It might have been nice to have had more respite to appreciate Mays’s closefisted Scrooge, his liberal Cratchit and sweet Fan.
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November 21, 2022
Truncation is the only alteration to Dickens’ tale here, which Mays both narrates and occupies. The result is a theatrically ambitious but utterly aimless offering of holiday bah humbug.
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November 21, 2022
There are more than the usual number of miracles to be observed with the latest version of A Christmas Carol to hit Broadway.
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November 21, 2022
Playing both narrator and all the characters is no small feat—as the warm standing ovation for Mays showed at the end, the night this critic attended, reflected. But the magic of this production, adapted by Mays, Susan Lyons, and director Michael Arden, is just as much to do with the Laffrey’s stupendous stage design, which is a riot of trickery and surprises, Ben Stanton’s lighting, and Joshua D. Reid’s sound design.
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November 21, 2022
That opening line always gives me the chills, and never more so than in this one-man (plus spooky specter) show featuring that consummate artist of many voices and lightning-quick changes, Jefferson Mays.
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November 21, 2022
No two actors could achieve what Mays, Stanton and Arden offer up here: the suddenly meek and frightened Scrooge bathed in warm candle light one minute, the commanding and devouring Marley drenched in green stench only a second later. How can any “Christmas Carol” ever top that kind of theatrical tour de force?
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November 21, 2022
To you, dear reader, I would offer that you have never seen a Christmas Carol quite like the one now running on Broadway at the Nederlander Theatre, and that if you see only one version of Dickens’s classic tale this season, this should be it.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 21, 2022
Nothing wrong with a good shudder at the holidays. Gets you in practice for the new year.
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November 21, 2022
What’s so striking about this streamlined “Carol,” though, is the grandeur it manages to summon with simplicity — and how brisk the show is in every sense of the word.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 21, 2022
It’s easy to get a little humbug: Another holiday season, another take on A Christmas Carol. Like other theatrical versions of the classic, this one ends with the same words credited to Tiny Tim – “God bless us, everyone.” But a production this taut and well-told is its own sort of blessing.
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November 21, 2022
It’s a thrilling start which suggests a fright-tastic, horror theater approach to Charles Dickens’s oft-theatricalized 1843 novella. Only for 30 or so spine-tingling minutes does this new adaptation, co-conceived by director Michael Arden and scenic/costume designer Dane Laffrey, live up to that promise.
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