Before Henry W. Longfellow heard the bells on Christmas Day, or George Bailey came to embrace his not-ungenerous fate—indeed, barely a year after Scrooge awoke from his ghostly holiday gallivant—Charles Dickens attempted to repeat the success of his bestselling holiday fable with a parable of New Year's epiphany, inspired by the Genoese cathedral bells he encountered while vacationing in Italy.
Like most sequels, this second effort failed to achieve the quality of his first: Its would-be protagonist was no defiant misanthrope, but a meek freelance courier bullied by his social superiors into subjugative compliance, only to be strong-armed by the gloomy prognostications of bigger bullies into accepting his world's injustices and putting his faith in the hope of a better future.
The other characters, both virtuous and venal, are likewise unswerving in temperament, expressed through oratorical summaries. The supernatural intervention of goblins dwelling in the church's tower may herald a more cheerful outlook for our innocents but engineers few changes to their fundamental circumstances.
It's all up to Nick Sandys—a Cambridge-trained actor-director whom some say could recite the timetable of the Burlington-Northern Metra train and have audiences call for an encore—to hold our attention for his 100-minute solo adaptation of a morality fable that cannot help but fall short of its prototype. This task he proceeds to accomplish by means of verbal dexterity encompassing a multiple-octave range of dialects (note especially the velar-nasal extensions in the voices of the pealing bells) and an uncanny ability to alter his very facial appearance with a mere turn of his head.
Against the background of an authentic Victorian-era parlor, with minimal technical assistance from stage manager Mara Segal and video editor Ian Frank, Sandys as performer inhabits the persona of Dickens at his most pedagogical without a wink or nudge to distract us from the enduring, if heavy-handed, lesson on the despair engendered by a capricious universe, while Sandys the adaptor's choice of source material represents an alternative to what the British-born artist sees as a plethora of Christmas Carols. "Dickens is popular in England, but A Christmas Carol’s ubiquity within the American theatrical tradition is a curiosity."
