DVDs: God Bless Us, Everyone
Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol has been the source of a number of films, a couple of them superb. And it has been musicalized on several previous occasions. There was the animated TV musical Mr. Magoo's Christmas and a live-action TV musical called The Stingiest Man in Town. Broadway got an all-black musicalization called Comin' Uptown starring Gregory Hines, while Richard Kiley starred in a national tour of an adaptation by Sheldon Harnick and Michel Legrand.
Currently playing at off-Broadway's Lucille Lortel Theatre is Theatreworks/NYC's musical version of A Christmas Carol, with a score by Dick Gallagher and Mark Waldrop. And there has been at least one major musical film version, Scrooge, with songs by Leslie Bricusse, that's quite respectable, and has been turned into a stage musical, currently in revival in London starring Tommy Steele.
With music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, and a book by Ahrens and director Mike Ockrent, a new musical version of A Christmas Carol was created in the mid-'90s for an elaborate staging at New York's Madison Square Garden. First performed in late 1994, the musical got a mixed reception but was repeated at the Garden for the next nine holiday seasons, with a variety of stars featured. The Garden having retired the production, the musical was picked up for TV and given a big NBC holiday film version that was telecast in late 2004 and has now made its way to DVD.
The director of the film version of A Christmas Carol is Arthur Allan Seidelman, who staged the Broadway flop Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks and has done a number of the Los Angeles Reprise! concerts. The cast includes such musical theatre veterans and TV stars as Jason Alexander Marley, Jane Krakowski Ghost of Christmas Past, and Jesse L. Martin Ghost of Christmas Present. In the role of Scrooge is TV's Kelsey Grammer, whose musical theatre credits include the title role in Sweeney Todd in a Los Angeles concert. Shot in Budapest, the new A Christmas Carol features in small roles a number of British musical-theatre performers, including Ruthie Henshall, Linzi Hateley, Claire Moore, Julie-Alanah Brighten, Jenny Galloway, Gay Soper, and Dave Willetts.
With a teleplay by Ahrens, the TV production is faithful to the stage musical. What's most notable about the film is that it has retained almost all of the lengthy stage score and so contains a tremendous amount of music for a network TV film. Grammer turns in a hard-working, effective star performance.
In any version, A Christmas Carol is a fairly foolproof property that tends to work and to be affecting. It works here once again, and, as in the theatre, the underrated Menken-Ahrens score supplies most of the charm and heart of the movie. Yet while the production is quite elaborate, the film lacks the spark of inspiration that would make it distinguished. And in terms of a Christmas Carol screen musical, it doesn't really surpass Scrooge. Still, fans will likely want to collect this DVD, as it features a generally overlooked entry in the recent history of films based on long-running New York stage musicals.
The DVD includes two significant bonuses. One is the expected "behind-the-scenes" featurette. The other is a full-length track of audio commentary by director Seidelman. In between lauding everyone involved in the film, he explains how several of the special effects were achieved; describes how the fake snow was created the film was shot during a hot Hungarian summer; and points out the one scene where the dialogue is taken straight from Dickens.