We all know the story of A Christmas Carol. Charles Dickens’s story has been adapted for the stage and screen — both big and small — many times. The three spirits and Marley in A Very Nosedive Christmas Carol know this. They have been eternally doomed to redeem the hateful and miserly grump Ebenezer Scrooge every Christmas and are getting quite tired of changing Scrooge’s misanthropic ways. Maybe this year they decide they’ve had enough and kill him. Or maybe, in redeeming Marley for the umpteenth time, they appreciate the value of compassion and the joys of tradition.

There really isn’t a whole lot you can do with Dickens’s story that hasn’t been done a million times before . When Marley talks about being stuck in an endless loop and having to return to the same night, every year, he’s referring to his numerous incarnations and forms warning all the other numerous incarnations and forms of Scrooge.

Marley and the spirits have had to warn Reginald Owen, Alastair Sim, Mister Magoo, Scrooge McDuck, Bill Murray, Michael Caine, Patrick Stewart, Vanessa Williams, and so on, and so on (according to the IMBD, Kelsey Grammer will be the latest incarnation of Scrooge).

And every time we get to Christmas, Scrooge is back to his misanthropic self.

The spirits in A Very Nosedive Christmas Carol are actors: actors in a long-running show for one reluctant audience member. Sometimes they try new things, sometimes they’re solid, sometimes they phone it in.

On one hand, it feels very weird to be staging a show that can seem…well, let’s not mince words…clichéd, and it also feels weird to stage a show about the downfalls of greed in order to raise money (not that we won’t take your money).

But on the other hand, isn’t the preceding attitude the kind of cynicism we came here to expunge?

Yeah, yeah, Nosedive can be warm-hearted and sentimental from time to time. Just don’t tell anyone.

And…oh, what the heck? God bless us, everyone!

Toasted on eggnog,

James “Humbug” Comtois

New York, 2004