A Christmas Carol makes a triumphant return to Theatre Calgary
iPhoto caption: Photo by Trudie Lee.
Theatre Calgary’s annual production of A Christmas Carol has some huge stockings to fill this holiday season. Last year’s show came back in full swing after the pandemic forced the company to scale back its flagship festive production. Marking the tradition’s 37th year, the 2024 version is slated to feature all the brilliance and holly-jolliness of A Christmas Carols past — and much more.
“We made it 100 per cent more spectacular last year,” costume designer Deitra Kalyn said in an interview. “I thought [this year’s production would] be about 20 per cent more, [but] it’s gotten about 40 per cent more. Because we’ve had the time, we just kind of went for it.”
Since its very first A Christmas Carol in 1983, the company has used a number of different adaptations of Dickens’ beloved story, and has been working with the current version, by Calgary’s own Geoffrey Simon Brown, since 2019.
“It’s easy to do A Christmas Carol where it’s just panache and splash and holly and berries. This is not that,” said Theatre Calgary artistic director, Stafford Arima, about Brown’s adaptation.
Having selected the millennial playwright to take on adapting Dickens’ novella in the spring of 2018, Arima has directed each production of Brown’s A Christmas Carol since. He noted that “Geoffrey is of a generation that is excited about holding up a mirror to the audience as Dickens did.”
Although Brown’s script follows Dickens’ plot quite faithfully, Kalyn spoke to its refreshed tone: “This particular version,” she said, “is a little bit darker. It’s a little bit moodier. I think the stakes are a little bit higher.”
The production relies, Arima stressed, on a balance between the gravity of Dickens’ themes and that “panache and splash” of a big Broadway-like show.
“How do you make sure that the grit of the adaptation doesn’t get glossed over by too much cranberry sauce?” he joked. “[The creative team] wanted to… allow that grit to have its presence, but also to celebrate the moments where we just need to be in Christmas mode.”
And there’s no shortage of holiday magic and metaphorical cranberry sauce. Coming from a musical theatre background and with a Broadway directing credit under his belt, Arima first approached this production of A Christmas Carol with an eye towards grandness. The show has a cast of 22 actors, 4 swings, and features over 1,000 costume pieces (including 300 pieces of fruit — if you know, you know).
“The spectacular part, in my opinion, is what we’ve done costume-wise,” said Kalyn. “There are moments [when] the audience audibly gasps and reacts to certain entrances.”
Given the hefty size of the cast, designing this garb is no simple feat. “You have a lot of bodies to dress, and they’re playing multiple characters, and they have quick changes,” Kalyn explained. “So you really have to think about how that’s practically and physically possible with Earth minutes and Earth seconds.”
The “costume math,” as Kalyn affectionately calls it, is made significantly less daunting by the fact that the creative team revisits A Christmas Carol every year. Kalyn, who has been with the show since 2019, expressed how thankful she was for the unique opportunity to “go back to the work, continue to fine tune it, and really settle in it.”
Arima voiced a similar gratitude, saying that with each season “there are new cast members on that stage who’ve never done this production before” which adds “freshness and an aliveness” plus “a whole other level of beautiful complexity.”
To top off the wow-factor of its cast and costumes, this production boasts an original score by music director and composer, Allison Lynch, that has, as she described, “a bit of everything.”
“There’s live music and recorded music, and there’s singing and there’s instruments,” she said. “Sometimes you get maybe one of those elements or maybe two in a production. But this one has all of them.”
Some of Lynch’s favourite musical elements in A Christmas Carol are, fittingly, her original Christmas carols. More than just nods to the play’s title, Lynch’s carols speak to the very thing that makes A Christmas Carol continuously powerful for audiences today: interconnectedness and “our shared humanity.”
“I think one of the most delightful things about the show is singing with everyone together,” she said. “There’s something magical that happens in a choir or on stage… It does something to the makeup of your body, where it changes what’s going on inside you in a very beautiful way.”
Lynch explained how the carols embody the fact that “we’re all connected” — performers and audiences alike. “I really feel that every night when we perform the show,” she said.
These feelings of togetherness aren’t unique to the onstage action of A Christmas Carol, either. Arima described the rehearsal process as “joyful,” with cast members often breaking out into song both on and off the stage. “There’s something about this show,” he noted. “It [brings] out the holiday spirit in people.”
The comfort of a familiar tale paired with the freshness of a novel adaptation is exactly why, Kalyn explained, Theatre Calgary’s A Christmas Carol has become part of “Calgary’s identity” and a tradition for many locals. (And, in her words, the “chicken noodle soup” of Calgary’s winters.)
“It feels like a secret that this town has [which] everybody is in on,” she said. “It’s this lovely little thing that we have every winter that we get to experience together.”
“It brings me, as an artistic director,” Arima said, “a lot of joy to know that… the generations of Calgarians who saw [the show] when they were a young person, now, 37 years later, they’re bringing their sons and daughters.”
One of the “greatest gifts” of the show, Arima explained, is that very timelessness. “I think that we all have in our lives come across a Scrooge,” he said. “We all know someone who is stuck. And I think that this piece reminds us of the power of an awakening, the power of change that can happen.” No matter your age, the production proves “there’s always room for growth.”
And for all of the glitz of Theatre Calgary’s A Christmas Carol, Kalyn assured me that the production never loses sight of what matters most: “family, friends, and community.”
“The love and the belief that permeates through the organization isn’t just about what happens on the stage,” Arima said. “It’s really a coming together of a family that takes a lot of pride […] in this production and thrives hearing that roar of the audience at the end of the show, and then, of course, seeing the young people who are having their first experience going to the theater.”
“The joy,” Arima said, “is seeing the joy in others.”
Eve Beauchamp
Eve Beauchamp (they/them) is an award-winning Calgary-based theatre artist, playwright, and graduate of the BFA in Acting at the University of Ottawa. They are the co-artistic director of Levity Theatre Company and primarily create work that explores queerness, capitalism, and neurodivergence through humour, poetry, and storytelling. Currently, you can find them pursuing their Master of Fine Arts in Drama at the University of Calgary.
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