"It's Christmas, Carol!" at OSF

Oregon Shakespeare Festival production photo by Joe Sofranko

 

I'm not generally a big fan of holiday shows. I have seen more versions of Dickens's A Christmas Carol than I probably need. But when the folks responsible for OSF's recent revivals of a couple of Marx Brothers plays (Animal Crackers and The Cocoanuts) decided to do a holiday show (extremely loosely) based on the Dickens classic, I knew I needed to see it.

So off we trundled to Ashland for an overnight stay between Christmas and New Year's, just long enough to see a matinee of It's Christmas, Carol!.

The Play

It's definitely not A Christmas Carol. But it's really fun. We have a narrator who tries to tell the story, but the Ghosts of Holidays Past, Present and Future (who remarkably resemble Groucho, Chico, and Harpo Marx) keep stepping out of the story and disrupting the telling. Meanwhile, Carol Scroogenhouse, who is supposed to be the subject of the story (and the ghosts' lessons), isn't quite getting it, and, well, things go pretty far off the rails.

You didn't really expect coherence from a Marx-inspired play, did you? I mean, that, and dinosaurs. It's all good.

The Production

It's what one expects from OSF: solid actors, high-quality design and implementation. Really, had they done this good a job with most of their mainstage productions in the season, it would have been a better year.

Most importantly, the return of the trio of Mark Bedard, John Tufts, and Brett Hinkley as the holiday ghosts/Marx Brothers is very welcome and successful. Since the trio also wrote the show and composed the tunes, it's not surprising that their roles work very well for them. OSF regular Christiana Clark is great as the increasingly-frustrated narrator. The rest of the cast is obviously having a good time, and that makes it all work for everyone.

Bottom Line

It's exactly what you expect. It's fun, it's funny, and it's quite well done. It's way better than seeing another earnest retelling of Dickens' story, and much more fun than any holiday movie. I suspect this pandemic-era innovation will be an Ashland holiday tradition for a while. I plan to go see it again next year to see what new madness they've added.