Title:
A Christmas
Carol (also called A
Christmas Carol: The Musical on most commercial releases)
Format:
Musical live
action TV movie
Country:
USA
Production
company:
Hallmark
Entertainment, for NBC
Year:
2004 (first
broadcast on NBC in the USA on November 28th that year)
Length:
97 minutes
Setting:
Victorian England
Background:
Unlike, for
example, the 1954 or 1956 US TV musicals, this isn’t actually an original
musical created entirely for television, but an adaptation of a stage musical
first performed at the Paramount Theatre in New York’s Madison Square Garden in
December 1994. The musical was then revived as an annual event every Christmas
until 2003, before being adapted into this TV movie version for the NBC
television network in the US the following year.
Cast and crew:
Starring as
Scrooge is Kelsey Grammer, best known for playing Dr Frasier Krane in the
sitcom Cheers and its successful spin-off Frasier, which had come
to an end earlier in 1994. Frasier had also been broadcast by NBC, who
were presumably then looking for other projects into which to put the star of
what had been a very popular show for them.
Another sitcom
star to look out for is Jason Alexander, who played George Costanza in Seinfeld,
who appears here as Jacob Marley. Jennifer Love Hewitt, another familiar face
to US TV viewers from shows such as Party of Five, takes the role of
Emily – this production’s version of Belle, renamed for no readily apparent
reason.
Lynn Ahrens wrote
the script – she had also co-written the book and lyrics for the original
musical version and enjoyed a long and successful career in musical theatre,
film and television. Alan Menken provided the music, having scored the original
stage version, and the production was directed by Arthur Allan Seidelman. Seidelman
had at this point been working as a film and television director for some 35
years, with an early directorial credit being Arnold Schwazenegger’s first
starring role, Hercules in New York.
Underdone Potato:
We begin not in
Scrooge’s office or in any of the other major locations usually visited in the
story – instead, we start where Dickens tells us Scrooge’s name is (uniquely,
perhaps!) good; on ‘Change, the Royal Exchange. After an opening Christmas
song-and-dance number from those assembled there, Scrooge comes bustling in
with Cratchit, the latter of whom has a cold which Scrooge says he’ll deduct a
penny of his wages from every sneeze of.
A man who owes
Scrooge a mortgage payment, and whose wife has recently died, has brought his
young daughter with him to beg for more time to pay, but gets shot shrift from
Scrooge. The girls becomes a recurring presence throughout this version,
tugging at Scrooge’s conscience in much the manner that Tim usually does, although
Tim is still present.
There are three
rather than two charitable gentlemen, but they are dismissed in the usual
fashion, all of this taking place at the Exchange. Despite some of the dialogue
from what’s usually the scene with Fred having been used in this opening
sequence, we do still then get a Fred scene, as he meets his uncle on the walk
back to the offices of Scrooge & Marley, and goes inside with him to also
be dismissed in the usual way. There’s an odd bit here where Grammer says “Bah,
humbug!” as if he’s quoting the phrase rather than saying it how you naturally
would if it weren’t a famous quote; actually saying ‘bah!’ rather than making
the noise.
There’s perhaps
an attempt at being a bit meta where Scrooge says to himself he’s not going to end
up dancing in he snow and throwing coins to the poor, although it is something
of a trope – usually in contemporary-set adaptations – for the Scrooge
character to insist this sort of thing isn’t going to work on him or her.
I’d never seen
this adaptation before coming to write his review, and knew very little about
it, but you can tell something of its lack of subtlety when it immediately
signals to you that three apparently unimportant people Scrooge meets – a man
selling tickets for a theatre show, a woman standing in for her husband’s job
as lamplighter because he’s ill, and a blind woman begging in the street – are
going to be the three spirits who visit Scrooge later. You know who they’re
going to be as soon as they appear, and they give you rather heavy-handed hints
about this in their dialogue.
This idea of
having the spirits played by those playing characters Scrooge had met earlier
in the drama was of course done by another American TV musical version fifty
years prior to this, in 1954. Whether that was a deliberate influence or not I
can’t say, but there does seem to be inspiration taken from other versions –
more so, perhaps, than the original book.
We see quite a
bit of the Cratchits’ Christmas preparations, and then of course the haunting from
Marley. This has a strange turn at the start at Marley embraces Scrooge –
making them seem far closer friends than Dickens suggests. It then turns into
something of an out-and-out horror film, with skeletons and shrieking spirits
flying across the room. Marley specifically tells Scrooge what the three
spirits coming to see him will be, giving him more foreknowledge of what he’s
in for than is usual.
 |
| The pole-dancing Ghost of Christmas Past! |
Past:
Having played the
lamplighter in the earlier scene, Jane Krakowski now appears as a sort of ‘sexy’
Ghost of Christmas Past – she even does a bit of pole-dancing around one of
Scrooge’s bedposts. Just to make really certain that everyone absolutely
understands what they’ve done, Scrooge comments on her resemblance to the woman
who he met earlier.
The Spirit’s
introduction of the visions resembles an episode of This is Your Life,
as she hands him a great big book of his life and times, with moving images
inside as he opens it. There’s no school scene, here – instead, there’s an
attempt to explicitly explain why Scrooge is the way he is, as we’re
transported to a courtroom where Scrooge’s father is being sentences to prison
for his debts. Fan and young Ebenezer are there, along with a rare appearance
in any adaptation for Scrooge’s mother, a character not even mentioned in the
book. As he’s taken own, Scrooge’s father tells his son to make sure he hangs
onto every penny he earns to avoid sharing his fate.
Young Scrooge is
sent to work in a boot factory, which suggests this whole idea was modelled on
Dickens’s own history, his father having been sent to a debtors’ prison when he
was 12, and young Charles having had to go and work in a boot polish factory.
Scrooge’s father is even given the same name as Dickens’s, John.
We then see the
Fezziwigs’ party, with two special guest appearances. Belle is here in many
adaptations, and the pointlessly-renamed Emily follows suit. Also here, as does
occasionally happen but much less so than with Belle, is Marley, a fellow young
apprentice with Scrooge at the Fezziwigs’. In common with the 1999 adaptation,
this TV movie then perhaps slightly gives away its American originals despite
its UK setting and mostly-British accents, with a gag at the expense of
England. In 1999 it was about the beef, whereas here it’s a joke about it
always raining.
The next look
back suggests that Marley’s presence at the party was perhaps inspired by the
1951 version, as we see Scrooge and Marley here now in business together
betraying Fezziwig by refusing to help his failing business, something not in
the book but very similar to what happens in that fifties adaptation. In the
same scene, Belle / Emily enters the office as Fezziwig leaves, and we get the
parting scene with Scrooge. In common with much of the rest of this production,
very little of Dickens’s original dialogue is used here. I mean, why would you?
He’s only one of the greatest authors ever to write in the English language,
I’m sure you wouldn’t want to lumber your audience with that.
Also much like
the 1999 version, and some others, Scrooge exhorts his younger self to “go
after her!” We do then get a scene set at the time of Marley’s death – but
unlike in the original it’s not at Belle’s house, but instead we actually see
Marley collapse and die in the office. Depicting Marley’s death again harks
back to the 1951 version, which seems to have been a great influence, but
unlike that version Scrooge here seems to be quite upset by it, as opposed to
in the book where we’re told he wasn’t so dreadfully cut up about it that he
couldn’t do a good business deal on the day of the funeral.
The Spirit looks
nothing like a candle flame here so Scrooge can’t snuff her out, but she does
appear for a final time in the smoke from a candle he extinguishes by his
bedside at the end of her section.
 |
| Marley dies in Scrooge's arms. |
Present:
Scrooge once
again comments on the similarity between the Ghost of Christmas Present and
someone he met near the beginning of the film, in this case the man selling
theatre tickets for a Christmas show. They seem terrified that anybody might
not pick up on this and therefore not notice how clever they’ve been.
This Spirit is
the closest of the three to the traditional depiction, with his large cloak and
crown of greenery. We then get a very long song in the theatre where the
Christmas show is taking place, here just a vision rather than anything real as
Scrooge can be seen by those around him, and the Spirit is the star of the
show. The girl whose mother has just died from the beginning is in the
audience, sullen and unsmiling until Scrooge tosses her a small gift from the
stage.
After what feels
like hours we finally move onto some actual visions of Christmases taking
place, seeing the Cratchits’ household and Fred’s, as usual. We also get
Ignorance and Want, although the Spirit does not seem to have appreciably aged
at all, and Scrooge makes no comment to suggest that he has.
Yet to Come:
The future
spirit, in the form of the blind woman Scrooge met earlier who now comes and
knocks at his door before transforming into a ghoulish spectre in white rather
than black, is referred to as the Ghost of Christmas “Yet to Be”. This is
seemingly entirely because they needed to call it that to fit a rhyme in one of
the songs earlier on, and they stick with it through the rest of the film.
The businessmen
discuss Scrooge’s funeral, but instead of it being a coming event, in this
version it has been and gone with nobody having attended. This entire segment
of the story all takes place in the graveyard – the other scenes are dropped
down into it with some suggestive bits of scenery and mist around, as we then
have Mrs Dilber – or “Mrs Mopps” as she is here, again a name change for no
particular reason – selling Scrooge’s belongings to Old Joe, who in this
version is a rag-and-bone man. This other-worldly, mist-shrouded version of the
visions evokes the 1959 TV version, although in this case I doubt that was a
deliberate influence.
We see the
Cratchits by Tim’s grave, and then a whole gathering of the dead – including
Fan and Scrooge’s mother – as Scrooge repents and decides to do good with his
life.
 |
| Not your traditional Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. |
What’s To-Day:
Scrooge doesn’t
call out of his window to a boy, but instead hauls one inside when two carol
singers knock at his front door. After sending the boy off to buy the bird, he
then gets dressed and shocks Mrs Dilber – sorry, Mrs Mopps – in again what
seems another bit influence by the 1951 version, although she’s more amused
that terrified in this version, and worried about him going outside without his
coat.
Scrooge goes
about the streets dispensing money and goodwill in exactly the way he said he
wouldn’t at the start, before heading off to Bob’s to surprise him with his new
Christmas meal. He then takes his massed ensemble to Fred’s – which,
conveniently, only seems to be just around the corner from where the Cratchits
live.
Review:
In the days when
he wrote television reviews for The Guardian, the great Charlie Brooker
once said of the first episode of the American TV drama Prison Break that,
“It's like they took a two-year-old to see The Shawshank Redemption,
asked him to recount the plot three weeks later, wrote down everything he said,
and filmed it.”
This feels somewhat like a Christmas Carol version
of that. It’s as if Lynn Ahrens remembered seeing some other adaptations in the
past – particularly the 1951 version – and decided to write down everything
that she remembered without consulting the original book… and then they made a
musical out of it.
The musical aspect is also one of the major problems. The
most often-used title of the thing presents the same problem faced by Christmas
Carol: The Movie. When you call yourself ‘The Musical’, as this is
labelled on most of its commercial releases even if not in the opening titles, you
sound as if you’re making a great claim to be definitive, and that’s asking a
lot when you have the shadow of the 1970 musical Scrooge hanging over
you. The Muppet version also has some memorable songs in it, which would have
been familiar to much of the viewing audience.
This version simply can’t match either of those, in any
respect but particularly with its songs. Mind you, I say ‘songs’ but they’re
all so bland and unmemorable that overall it just feels like very slight
variations on the same song repeated all the way through, ad nauseum.
In a nutshell:
I had wondered
why such a comparatively recent version seemed to have such a low profile, and
now I know why. Not recommended.
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