With New Staging, CSC Director Steve Maler Addresses the Redemptive Power of 'A Christmas Carol'

The Commonwealth Shakespeare Company is well known for its summer productions of Shakespeare plays, which take place out of doors on the Boston Common. But the company also produces indoor work during the winter months, and this holiday season Founding Artistic Director Steven Maler directs an adaptation with holiday music of the classic Charles Dickens novella "A Christmas Carol."

The beloved Yuletide tale blends Dickens' social conscience with supernatural goings-on as the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge (Will Lyman) is visited by his deceased business partner Jacob Marley (Bobbi Steinbach) and then by three spirits: The Ghost of Christmas Past (Kathryn McKellar), the Ghost of Christmas Present (Carolyn Saxon), and the Ghost of Christmas Future (Damon Singletary). The trio offer Scrooge (and the audience) a highlights reel of the old man's unsatisfying life, from a youth where he failed to learn kindness from his beloved sister or his employer, Mr. Fezziwig (Neil Ferreira); to the current day, when he's rejected an invitation to the Christmas celebration of his nephew, Fred (Jared Troilo), and lastly to his inevitably grim future. In contrast to Scrooge's own joyless life, the miser sees how his poverty-stricken clerk, Bob Cratchit (Robert St. Laurence), enjoys a family life of few material comforts that is nonetheless rich and rewarding.

The perennial tale of self-examination and transformation has had a place in the culture's heart from the moment the story was first published in 1843, and its adaptations for stage, film, and television have been legion. Maler has chosen to produce a stage version by New York director and actor Steve Wargo, who has incorporated a number of Christmas carols from Dickens' day into the work, abundantly infusing the play with music. (Dan Rodriguez serves as music director for CSC's production, and Dianne Adama McDowell as arranger and composer.)

EDGE caught up with Steve Maler to learn more about Wargo's musically rich adaptation, the stellar cast Maler has assembled, and why the Dickens classic reverberates so strongly even now in our 21st Century zeitgeist.