There have been a lot of stage adaptations of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol: This holiday chestnut is an audience favorite, and – even better for theatres’ budgets – in the public domain. The best I have ever seen was a very warm and spectacular version on Broadway in 2019, which had the cast tossing and passing clementines and cookies to the audience before the show. This season’s Broadway version is second only to that one, but takes an opposite approach, leaning into the Gothic elements of what is essentially a ghost story.

In fact it’s so Gothic that in place of those clementines there are eerie sounds in the house, and a dimly lit ornate coffin on the stage. A sudden total blackout accompanied by a loud thud of a sound cue reconfirms the chilly, ominous tone. When the lights come back on, the brilliant Jefferson Mays begins narrating a version of the story closely adapted from an abridged version Dickens himself took on many a reading tour. Not for nothing Jefferson Mays is listed in the program simply as “The Mourner.”

But this is certainly not just a reading. The work of all the designers, especially Projection Designer Lucy Mackinnon, transmit the spectral atmosphere with great ingenuity – as spectacular as that 2019 production in an entirely different way.

Mays, long since known to be the master of playing multiple characters, plays no less than 50 here. Most effective: a Jacob Marley who truly appears to have cold dead eyes, a Bob Crachit who is genuinely warmly self-effacing, and of course Scrooge himself, whose arc of redemption Mays gives real heft. Highly recommended.

For tickets, click here.

To learn about Jonathan Warman’s directing work, see jonathanwarman.wordpress.com.