Production archive
Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol
2007 season · Production archive
“Marley was dead, to begin with” — and what happens to Ebenezer Scrooge’s mean, sour, pruney old business partner after that? Chained and shackled, Marley is condemned to a hellish eternity, and given his own private tormentor: a malicious little hell-sprite who thoroughly enjoys his work. Desperate, Marley accepts his one chance to free himself — to escape his own chains he must first redeem Scrooge. So begins a journey of laughter and terror, redemption and renewal, during which Scrooge’s heart is indeed opened; but not before Marley, in this irreverent, funny and deeply moving story, discovers his own.
- Written by
- Tom Mula
- Directed by
- Terry Dodd
- Ran
- November 16 – December 23, 2007
- Cast
- Nils Kiehn · Rita Broderick · Suzanna Wellons · Brian J. Brooks
About the production
Mula’s adaptation gives the novella to its most disposable character and lets him narrate his own damnation. Four actors carry every part between them, which puts the whole evening on ensemble timing rather than scenery — the reviewer who called it the ideal marriage of artistry and venue was making a point about the room as much as the cast.
It replaced the Durang parody as the Vic’s December show and held the slot; a version of it returned in 2010, in what turned out to be the theatre’s last full Christmas. Dickens’s original has been adapted more or less continuously since 1843 — the Charles Dickens Museum traces that history from the house where he wrote — and the Vic managed to programme both the reverent and the irreverent ends of it within three years.
What the press said
“a story that parallels the one we’re all familiar with, then goes well beyond it…Warm and beautiful, (the Denver Victorian) provides the perfect background for this entertaining and quietly moving piece of theater.”
“Mula’s script is a delight from start to finish…the ideal marriage of artistry and venue…four exceptional performers who narrate and play multiple roles…ensemble work at its very best.”
Where it sat in the season
It was production 8 of 8 in the Vic’s 2007 season. It followed An Evening With Edgar Allan Poe (Oct 12 – Nov 3, 2007). The full year is set out on the season calendars page, and every production the theatre staged between 2005 and 2011 is indexed in the production archive.
The house’s standard pattern was Friday and Saturday evenings at 7.30 with a Sunday matinee, over a run of six to eight weeks. With seventy-five seats, a full eight-week run put roughly 1,800 people through the room — which a 500-seat theatre does in four nights, and which is the single fact that explains most of what the Vic chose to programme.
This page is part of the production archive of the Denver Victorian Playhouse, a seventy-five-seat theatre in the basement of a northwest Denver house that staged its last performance in 2011. Details here are restored from the theatre’s own records as they were published at the time; press quotations are reproduced with their original attributions and nothing has been added to them.