Manual Cinema premiered their version of A Christmas Carol as a live-streaming production in December 2020 during the pandemic shutdown and then reworked it as a live stage show for Writers Theatre in 2022 and 2023 (I saw it last year). Now they’ve brought it downtown to the Studebaker. I admit I wondered going in this year if the larger proscenium setting would lessen the intimacy of watching from home and in the more close-up Writers space.
Manual Cinema’s Christmas Carol
Through 12/29: Wed–Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2 and 7:30 PM; also Tue 12/24 2 PM; no shows Thu 12/19 and Wed 12/25; Studebaker Theater, 410 S. Michigan, 312-753-3210 ext. 102, fineartsbuilding.com/events/christmas-carol/, $54.50-$74.50 (students $26)
I needn’t have been concerned. The show, devised by Manual Cinema company members Drew Dir, Sarah Fornace, Ben Kauffman, Julia Miller, and Kyle Vegter (Nate Marshall is also credited with additional writing), is still an inventive, insightful, and at times painful portrait of self-imposed exile and the isolation of profound loss colliding with seasonal expectations of community gatherings and openheartedness. The larger space (featuring a larger projection screen so every cunning detail can still be seen in the auditorium) is expansive rather than limiting.
LaKecia Harris is back as Trudy, the grieving widow of Joe (though they were never officially married), who died of COVID some months earlier. It’s Christmas 2020 and Trudy, aided with a large glass or three of wine, is trying to keep one of Joe’s family traditions alive: a puppet show version of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.
To say she’s not in the spirit would be putting it mildly: Trudy reminds Joe’s relatives on Zoom that she’s not actually related to them, hates the gaudy holiday vest one of his relations sent to her, and basically despises everything about the story she’s trying to tell except for the “bah humbug” part. She even hates the house that she and Joe bought together and which she’s soon vacating. Everywhere she sees the projects that impractical Joe never finished in their “investment.” Even more painfully, we learn that the family they had hoped to start together, which might have filled the big drafty house (now filled with cardboard boxes of memories ahead of Trudy’s move to a condo) never came to be.
Using Manual Cinema’s usual array of cardboard stick puppets, storyboards on overhead projectors, and live music composed by Kauffman and Vegter and performed by Nora Barton, Lucy Little, and Alicia Walter (the latter also provides soaring vocals), the story shows the clear parallels between grieving Trudy and Scrooge, whose original sin is being miserly with his affections even more than his money. (The storyboard and puppet designs are by Dir, with additional puppet design and fabrication credited to Caitlin McLeod, Jackie Kelsey, Sian Silvio, and Tom Lee of the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival’s Chicago Puppet Studio.)
Harris seems to bring an even harder edge to Trudy than I recall from last year’s Writers production, which puts her even closer to the repellent side of Scrooge. But it also gives her journey even more of an arc. She’s not just grieving: she’s also pissed that Joe has left her, angry that she at least felt that she had to be the practical adult in their relationship (she notes that he took three weeks off every Christmas, while we see flashbacks of her working during his holiday family gatherings), and feeling cheated about going into the last act of her life without the one person who always seemed to get her.
It’s entirely relatable, and that’s where the emotional power of Manual Cinema’s adaptation comes from. But the visual elements and the music, in addition to Harris’s powerhouse performance, build in near-perfect harmony over the show’s 80 minutes or so. (The interlude where Scrooge flies over London with the Ghost of Christmas Past is simply hypnotic.) Puppeteers Felix Mayes, Kevin Michael Wesson, and Jeffrey Paschal (the latter also shows up as a food delivery guy in a charming cameo near the end) work with Harris to imbue the cardboard characters with lively resonance and playfulness, aided by some of the contemporary verbal flourishes nested within the original text. (The Ghost of Christmas Present comes across as a holly-clad version of the Dude in The Big Lebowski.)
For those of us (cough, cough) who have been having a particularly hard time feeling the holiday spirit this season, Manual Cinema’s Christmas Carol offers both reassurance that grief and anger are real and valid, and encouragement for finding ways to channel that into seeking out kindred spirits who are also just holding on by their fingernails and hoping to find some light, joy, and music to hold it together.
Find your people. Listen to their stories. And maybe take a chance on dancing with that goofy person at the party. You never know what might happen.
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