Players Workshop’s Children’s Theatre, at the Athenaeum Theatre.
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We can ridicule A Christmas Carol, we can revile it, we can shun it, but we cannot deny its fundamental truth. In this Players Workshop’s Children’s Theatre variation on Charles Dickens’s classic fable, Ms. Ebeneza Scrooge is a retail-store tycoon, Annie Scrooge is the daughter of Ebeneza’s war-casualty brother, Roberta Cratchet is the management assistant whom Ebeneza “terminates” on Christmas Eve, and little Tina Cratchet is the invalid child who will not get the operation she needs now that her mother no longer has medical insurance. The Ghost of Christmas Past is garbed as a flower child, Christmas Present as a Springsteen-style rocker, and Christmas Future as a sneering street vampire. No matter how high the gimmicks are piled on, however, the simple message that even the most misanthropic sinner can be redeemed remains as touching and universal as when the story was first written.
