"When their (perfect) adaptation was well past its twentieth birthday, director Brian Henson looked back on what had originally been envisioned as a "romping parody": "Then we stopped and reconsidered," he said. The screenwriter Jerry Juhl put it this way: "Rather than let the Muppets ride roughshod over Dickens, I went back to the novel and decided it would be rotten of us to belittle the quality of one of the greatest stories of all time.""
"The director Matthew Warchus swathes the production in flourishes, many of them at least partly charming: a galaxy of warm, twinkling lanterns suspended above the stage; a preshow in which the company plays carols and tosses cookies and clementines to the audience; showers of brightly lit foamy snow that will actually melt on your face."
"Regrettably, a take like Thorne's leaves little choice, since every time he parts ways with Dickens, it's to go down some utterly ineffectual path. This Ebenezer Scrooge (Michael Cerveris, gruff without being threatening, in a wig that's distractingly reminiscent of Kurt Russell's Big Trouble in Little China mullet) remains obdurate in the face of his various hauntings for so long that it starts to feel like these ghosts should be saving their moral makeover for someone else."
The stage adaptation reduces Dickens's ghost story, rendering it smaller and less potent. Matthew Warchus dresses the production in visual flourishes: suspended twinkling lanterns, a preshow with carols and tossed cookies and clementines, and foamy snow that melts on the audience. Those production charms coexist with a limp, self-satisfied script that leans toward a simplistic Freudian interpretation. Michael Cerveris portrays Ebenezer Scrooge as gruff and unthreatening, wearing a distracting wig. Departures from Dickens often follow ineffectual paths that undermine moral and emotional impact. Scrooge remains obdurate through the hauntings, making the ghosts' efforts feel misdirected.
Read at Vulture
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]