Press Release

Great Lakes Theater Festival Wraps Up Season With A Christmas Carol

October 26, 2005
Festival’s gift to Northeast Ohio is region’s best-loved holiday entertainment.

CLEVELAND, OH – The stage of the Ohio Theatre, Playhouse Square Center will glow with good spirits and time-honored tradition when Great Lakes Theater Festival (GLTF) presents its annual production of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, running November 25 through December 23, 2005. The production has delighted an estimated 375,000 people in its history, making it Northeast Ohio’s most-loved and best-attended holiday entertainment.

Great Lakes Theater Festival’s Associate Artistic Director, Andrew May, will stage former Artistic Director Gerald Freedman’s heartwarming adaptation of this classic tale. The production features a multi-generational cast of actors, singers and dancers led by veteran Cleveland actor Dudley Swetland, returning for his ninth season in the role of miserly Ebenezer Scrooge. The production sponsors for A Christmas Carol are Heinen’s Fine Foods, The John P. Murphy Foundation and Parker Hannifin Corporation. The production’s media sponsor is Soft Rock 102.1 FM WDOK. Media sponsors for the Festival’s 2005 season are Cleveland.com, Cleveland Free Times, WCLV 104.9 FM and WCPN 90.3 FM ideastream. Great Lakes Theater Festival’s 2005 season is dedicated to the memory of James O. Roberts (GLTF Trustee 1984-2005).

“It’s exciting for us as a company of artists to revisit this great, classic, holiday story,” said Andrew May, who will stage this season’s production. “We are blessed with an immensely talented cast and a wonderful adaptation that we can’t wait to share. I am overjoyed to return to direct a piece of theater again this season that has meant so much to this company and to this community as has A Christmas Carol for over a decade and a half.”

GLTF Producing Artistic Director Charles Fee remarked, “The combination of Gerald Freedman’s inspired and moving adaptation, Andrew May’s dynamic gifts as an artist, our remarkable design team and our talented cast are sure to delight audiences, whether they’re attending for the first time, or returning to experience this holiday tradition again with friends and family.”

Great Lakes Theater Festival’s resident company of fifteen actors, augmented by a young acting company of ten, will perform A Christmas Carol. Nineteen members of the acting company are Cleveland-based actors. “We are especially proud to have such a large number of Cleveland actors in our holiday company again this season,” said Charles Fee of his ensemble. “I think it clearly demonstrates the Festival’s commitment to the local acting community as well as to the economic development of the city of Cleveland.”

Freedman’s adaptation of A Christmas Carol is presented as a story within a story. The fictitious Cleaveland family gathers in its Victorian-era parlor on Christmas Eve, to read Mr. Dickens’ book. As Mrs. Cleaveland reads the story to her family, her youngest child, Master William, reimagines familiar faces as characters in the story: the Cleaveland’s crotchety manservant becomes Scrooge, Father becomes Bob Cratchit, Mother becomes Belle, and the Cleaveland children become the Cratchits, with Master William becoming the beloved Tiny Tim. In all, more than 60 Dickens characters are brought to life on stage.

In 2003, Gerald Freedman recounted his thoughts on developing the adaptation of GLTF’s first production of A Christmas Carol in 1989. “Now I know you may find this hard to believe, but I was in my fifties and I had never read A Christmas Carol, being a young Jewish fellow from Lorain, Ohio, and I had never seen it,” admitted Freedman. “I’d never seen any version of it. So the first thing I had to do was read the book. And it stunned me, which may seem odd to many who grew up with it as children, and an oft told tale. It just stunned me at what a beautiful work it was and how seriously Dickens had invested in the story. It has come to so many of us encrusted with mythology, and holiday good spirit and sweetness and light – all of which is part of it – but I hadn’t realized what a great, great story it was. What I saw in it was a story of redemption; that it is never too late for any of us to find the kernel of compassion, of humanity within us.”

The Festival’s production incorporates theatrical special effects to retain a strong sense of the supernatural, emphasizing the novel’s origins in folk tales and myth. Designers for the GLTF production blend exceptional stagecraft with dramatic effects that evoke the magical and mysterious aspects of a classic ghost story. GLTF resident designer John Ezell and Gene Emerson Friedman designed the scenery. The richly detailed costumes are by James Scott, lighting is by Mary Jo Dondlinger and is recreated this season by Cynthia Stillings. Sound design is by Tom Mardikes and Stan Kozak. Music was written by Robert Waldman, with Stuart Raleigh as musical director. Dances for A Christmas Carol were conceived by David Shimotakahara and staged by Pandora Robertson.

Great Lakes Theater Festival’s seventeenth annual production of A Christmas Carol previews on Friday November 25th at 1:30 p.m. Opening Night is scheduled for Friday, November 25th at 7:30 p.m. Curtain times for all evening performances will remain at 7:30 p.m., with a 1:30 p.m. curtain time for Saturday matinees and a 3:00 p.m. curtain time for Sunday matinees. An audio-described performance is scheduled for Sunday, November 27th at 3:00 p.m. A sign-interpreted performance is scheduled for Sunday, December 4th at 3:00 p.m.

Single tickets for Great Lakes Theater Festival’s production of A Christmas Carol range in price from $26.50-$55.00 (student tickets $17.50 – any performance / any seat) and are available by calling (216) 241-6000, by ordering online, by visiting the Playhouse Square Center Box office or any Tickets.com outlet located within all Tops Friendly Markets. Groups of ten or more receive discounts, as do educators and students.

Since 1962, Great Lakes Theater Festival has brought the pleasure, power and relevance of classic theater to the widest possible audience in Northern Ohio. The first resident company of Playhouse Square Center, Great Lakes Theater Festival has called the Ohio Theatre home since 1982.

A Conversation With Gerald Freedman…
Freedman spoke to Great Lakes Theater Festival’s company of A Christmas Carol in 2003, fifteen years after initially directing his own original adaptation in 1989.

There was a thought in my heart to just revisit the play. I’ve been away from it for so long. I want to tell you a little bit, how it began, and what I hope we can accomplish today. What I’m hoping this will do is renew the show’s original intentions. For those of you who’ve done this show before and often, it might be difficult to break old habits if it’s necessary to break them. But what I’m hoping is that you will be able to re-invest in this story, and that I can come back at a run-through before you go into tech and see what the accomplishment has been, and either affect the course that you’re on or congratulate you on the achievement that you’ve accomplished.

Many years ago, I went on the hunt for Christmas Carols. Now I know you may find this hard to believe, but I was in my fifties, and I had never read A Christmas Carol, being a young Jewish fellow from Lorain, Ohio, and I had never seen it. I’d never seen any version of it. So the first thing I had to do was read the book. And it stunned me, which may seem odd to many of you who grew up with it as children, and an oft told tale. It just stunned me at what a beautiful work it was, and how seriously Dickens had invested in the story. It has come to so many of us encrusted with mythology, and holiday good spirit and sweetness and light – all of which is part of it – but I hadn’t realized what a great, great story it was. What I saw in it was a story of redemption; not a Christmas story, but a story of redemption: that it is never too late, for any of us to find the kernel of compassion, of humanity within us.

One of the most telling moments is the scene with Christmas Present, with the little kids, Ignorance and Want. When I read it – I begin to tear up now – it hit me so hard that that was in this cute little Christmas story. Ignorance and Want are the real evils in our world. Ignorance and Want. It had a tremendous impact on me and I wanted to shape a show that earned that as its heart, to communicate that. And what that journey – which is filled with a lot of effects and things, so one doesn’t always know how an audience receives it – how that transformed Scrooge. And that it is possible for all of us, all of us, to change our lives at any moment; for good or for evil – hopefully for good.

Then I went on the search for – there were thousands of Christmas Carols out there – but for three or four that had constituencies and audiences in big theaters that had been successful for years. I read three or four of them. I also then began to look at Christmas Carol videos, and although this may seem arrogant to you – it wasn’t from a spirit of arrogance that I did this – I didn’t find any that I thought matched the spirit of the book that I had read. They were all very competent, all of them were professional, but they lacked what I saw in the story. I then set out to adapt it on my own. Not because I thought I could do a better job, but I thought I could get closer to what it meant to me.

The first problem when you do that is, how do you get into the story? That took me a long time to think, “How do I get into this story? How do you tell this story?” Ignorance and Want kept coming up, and I thought the way to tell this story was through a child’s eye. A child’s eye because they’re innocent, and unformed, and they aren’t in a sense encrusted with all the cynicism, all the showbiz qualities, if you will, working at both ends of it, that many of us have, and I thought of, “Hey, the Cleaveland family!” and inventing a framework in which a child could then fantasize this story through this family.

And it was, again, not just a cute device; to me it was very inner-directed, that the nasty authority figure could become a Scrooge, and that the mother could be all the wonderful ladies in this story. I thought it might be a way of entering in, and it certainly seemed that way to me and proceeded from that point. With the wonderful assistance of (set designer) John Ezell, we conceived this in the form you know it now.

What I’d like to do today is not read through it, but start to read. But I’m going to stop you when I want to be clear what I thought the values in the scene might be. Not to read through it – because I know you all can read – it’s what is the intention behind a scene. And then with your intelligence and your skills and Vicky’s, to make that happen. So bear with me. I don’t know what to expect, but it’s not out of disrespect that I will interrupt you, it is about being sure to clarify what is going on.

Several things that I value more than anything, but the first thing I value more than anything is talking and listening; that without communicating, you can’t have theater, it can’t be theater. So what do I want that makes a line, any line, have meaning? And not just meaning for me, but what do I want from the other person? That is essential. So it isn’t about acting alone, or about your skill, it’s about really investing in the particulars of the scene. And as we go through I’ll just try to be sure that that is happening.

When we come to the musical numbers, we’ll talk about them. All the musical numbers here are not meant to be “performed numbers.” They’re not “performance numbers.” Of course there’s an audience, of course we’re in a sense performing, we’re entertaining you, but from your point of view it is a London street, and you’re either talking across the street to someone, or you’re pointing or looking at another part of London, so that it isn’t about straight out delivery, “Hello, I’m singing, you’re talking;” none of the piece is meant to be that.

You also will know, if you go back to read the book, that I didn’t invent very much. I tried to use as much of Dickens’ language as I could because it is so great. He is such a great storyteller, and you know, he never had a successful play, but what a hell of a dramatist he was. We all can attest to it, we all keep on doing his stories, all the time. So again, it’s about trying to get back to that passion, which was endemic with him, and we see it over and over again: his concern for social injustice and our responsibility, as a community, to do something about it. That’s what I hope we can get back to, or maybe reinvent.

At A Glance