Commentary: A “Carol” Reimagined – How Adaptation Keeps Dickens Alive

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My Life in Carols

I often think “A Christmas Carol” is not a single story but a genre unto itself. Each new adaptation chooses its own style of Scrooge, its own ghostly temperature, its own way of balancing the cynical with the moral. My favorite versions form an educational timeline in how storytelling shape-shifts while keeping the same heartbeat.

The George C. Scott version, which appeared on CBS in 1984, was my first lesson in “Carol’s” tonal gravity. Scott’s Scrooge is a man carved from iron filings, his redemption as hard-won as any of Patton’s campaigns. There’s little whimsy or humor in that adaptation, and yet it honors Dickens’ social anger, the soot of London clinging to every frame. It was my introduction to the idea that “A Christmas Carol” could be fierce, political, a story not of cozy nostalgia but of human reckoning.

Then came Patrick Stewart’s 1988 one-man tour de force, a transformative theater experience for me and a master class in the power of suggestion. Alone onstage at Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium (before transferring to Broadway), I watched my favorite Star Trek actor evoke entire streets, feasts, and spectral visitations with only a chair and his voice. I saw in that performance the theatrical truth that imagination, once ignited, can populate a world without a single prop. The magic isn’t in the special effects. It’s in the human breath between words and actions.

And then, of course, my forever favorite, “The Muppets Christmas Carol” in 1992. I return to that one as often as possible with the zeal of a cult member. The absurdity of Kermit as Bob Cratchit and Michael Caine playing it straight only underscores the sincerity at the center of the story. The songs are joyful, the humor anarchic, but the sentiment stays true. The Muppets prove that earnestness can survive even the silliest framing, if the story’s heart is intact.

Then, at the Barbican in London, I lived inside it, taking rehearsal notes and making pots of tea for the 1995 Royal Shakespeare Company production. I experienced “Carol” as a full-scale machine as the production focused on engineering—full of trapdoors, fog, the shimmerof “gaslight”—to create an epic out of theatrical clockwork, running exactly on time. Locally, Chris Mangels’ 2007 one-man version at the Enchanted Playhouse in Visalia carried that same spark of innovation but focused it, combining solo performance with large-scale puppetry to great effect.

Each of these experiences, from Muppet mayhem to technical grandeur, reveals a different face of the same story. One may emphasize the language, another the spectacle, another the offbeat humor. Together they illustrate that adaptation is not “doing something to death;” it is evidence of vitality. A classic survives not because it resists change, but because it welcomes it. Because it adapts. 

And so when a local company mounts a new iteration of “A Christmas Carol,” as Good Company Players have done again this year, it isn’t imitation or repetition. It’s participation. Each staging adds a verse to the same carol, sung in a slightly different key.

A familiar story, newly seen: Good Company Players’ adaptation

When I exchanged emails with director Dan Pessano about GCP’s “A Christmas Carol,” I began with the inevitable question: why another version?

 “I can’t speak for Emily’s original motivation,” he said of his daughter’s adaptation, “but we both might share the view that every time period has offered opportunities to be generous and giving—not just to those in actual need, but in affection for the people we deal with daily.”

Jasmine Parmer and Camille Gaston in Good Company Players’ A Christmas Carol (2025/Courtesy of Good Company Players)

Emily Pessano’s 2023 adaptation uses a framing device set in the present day, reframing Dickens’ ghost story around a struggling mother (a wry and funny Camille Gaston) and teenage daughter (a sarcastic and sympathetic Jasmine Parmer) who read Dickens’ story together.  That lens, the elder Pessano suggested, holds up a mirror to our own “Scrooge reaction,” as he calls it, when we avert our eyes from need. The reminder is “there for the taking,” he said, “if the audience wants it.”

That invitation—“if the audience wants it”—captures something essential about adaptation itself. It’s an open hand rather than a lecture. 

Pessano is aware that such choices can ruffle feathers among purists. “If you want the exact text,” he writes, “then avoiding adaptations might be wise.” But in his view, the strength of great works is precisely that they can bear reimagining. “The cream of the work comes to the top in spite of ‘concepts,’” he said. The story’s core elements guides his approach as a director. “I try to find the moments that touch me and hopefully touch the audience,” he said. “Looking back at the moments we wish we had done better, and the people we hurt, I really identify with Scrooge’s pain.” He also finds himself moved by what he calls “the simple happy” of the Cratchit family (led by the warm and winsome pair Christopher Baeza and Amalie Larsen as Mr. and Mrs. Cratchit), and by Emily’s encouraging ending.

The initial 2023 production, directed by Elizabeth Fiester, was buoyed by an excellent Scrooge (Henry Montelongo, returning to the role this year and still excellent), but had a sense of still being workshopped. Certain aspects have been trimmed up and focused in its second iteration. 

Scott Johnson as Marley’s Ghost and Henry Montelongo as Scrooge in Good Company Players’ A Christmas Carol. (2025/Courtesy of Good Company Players)

For this year’s revival, Pessano made small but telling refinements: smoothing scene transitions, overlapping narration and action, adding projections and improved sound elements, and letting the ensemble’s children carry the carols. He even took a gamble on one of Emily’s more playful ideas—breaking the fourth wall as Parmer’s character is drawn into Scrooge’s story—acknowledging it might “ruffle a few purist feathers.” But that, too, is part of the vitality of adaptation: each staging is a new negotiation between reverence for the text and reinvention.

And beneath all of it runs a strain of joy. “I’m a bit of a bah humbug myself,” Pessano admitted, “but there’s something extremely special about being in a cast at holiday time. We’re a second family at a family time of year.” For many in the audience, “A Christmas Carol” is a ritual as dependable as any holiday meal, and Pessano takes satisfaction in that. “If they leave happy,” he said, “happy is a rare commodity right now.”

The Shared Dickensian World

Each December, I return to “A Christmas Carol” the way some people return to a favorite hymn. Like any ritual, its power lies in repetition. What struck me in Good Company Players’ staging was how simply that ritual is shared. There was a small, domestic moment when the Cratchits gathered at their table, their cares offset by the laughter of the Cratchit children. Around that table, the play’s compassion feels less like nostalgia and more like endurance. It represents a drive for connection that refuses to be extinguished.

Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come at the Great Dickens Christmas Fair. Photo: Phillip Pavliger

That, I think, is what keeps us coming back to Dickens’ story and to the theatre itself: the exchange of human warmth. “If ‘A Christmas Carol’ is part of the audience’s tradition,” Pessano writes, “then that’s the gift we give them and it’s always more fun to give a gift than to get one.” It’s a beautiful truth. The actors give themselves over to the story; the audience receives it and, in turn, gives back their belief. For a couple of hours, everyone in the room agrees that generosity is still possible and they share in that world.

At the Great Dickens Christmas Fair, the sixth of my foundational “Carols,” I experience the smell of spiced roasted nuts and the sound of fiddles while strolling through the market, dancing at Fezziwig’s party, and sharing a pint with my friends. I’ve seen that Dickensian world writ on a different scale: strangers pausing to listen to a costumed Charles Dickens recite a passage from the novella, wandering the streets that Scrooge traverses, becoming a background character in his story. There, I have run headlong into the presence of the ghosts of Christmases Past, Present, and Yet to Come. One visit, in the haze of a champagne buzz, I encountered the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come face to face. It stood just inches from me, gazing through black gauze into my face, eerily still and yet electrifying. At that moment, I shared Scrooge’s fervor in a visceral way, the line between imaginary London and my own weary present vanishing, replaced by the collective act of storytelling. 

And perhaps that’s what adaptation really offers us: a chance to enter the same story in a new way and find that it still has more to give. The miracle of “A Christmas Carol” isn’t that Scrooge changes. It’s that we keep believing he will. And, by believing, we keep adapting, too.

Good Company Players’ “A Christmas Carol” runs at the 2nd Space Theatre in Fresno through December 21. The Great Dickens Christmas Fair & Victorian Holiday Party also runs weekends Nov. 22 through Dec. 21 at the Cow Palace in Daly City.