THEATER REVIEW
‘A CHRISTMAS CAROL: The Musical,” the holiday perennial at the Theater at Madison Square Garden, is holding up well.
It’s a solidly entertaining family spectacle that makes excellent use of the cavernous spaces of the Garden, where the show will be through Dec. 30.
Designer Tony Walton has turned the place into a bustly, wintry, old London filled with wraparound street life. Dickensian extras dash up and down the aisles distributing sweets. William Ivey Long’s costumes have period panache.
The show looks a treat. It has exuberance, and the excited families present have a good time.
Three attractive and appealing stars energize the plot — Tony Roberts as an almost likable and not particularly forbidding Scrooge; the genial and flamboyant Reginald VelJohnson as the Ghost of Christmas Present; sweet Didi Conn, a lovely singer, as the Ghost of Christmas Past.
The story focuses — much more than Dickens did — on the life of Scrooge. It’s Christmas in London in 1880 and, while some are looking forward to “A Jolly Good Time,” Roberts insists it all has “Nothing to Do With Me.”
His employee croons to the sickly Tiny Tim that “You Mean More to Me.” Then night falls and the show gets down to business, as Scrooge, in nightcap and gown, is led on a tour of his traumatic past.
Composer Alan Menken and lyricist Lynn Ahrens have fashioned a fairly tuneful, if rather glib and formulaic psychodrama of a homeless man finding home.
Conn has a nice melody, “The Lights of Long Ago,” to key the voyage back in time. We see Scrooge’s dad go off to prison for debt and urging thrift on his little son, Scrooge’s mother dies, and his sister is torn away and placed in an orphanage. The little guy yearns for “A Place Called Home.”
At 18, young man Scrooge has learned his lesson too well, obsessing so totally on his job at a bank that he loses his girlfriend. There’s a gigantic, flouncy Christmas party at that bank (choreographer Susan Stroman having fun) that goes on forever, has nothing to do with the story, looks like every mediocre Broadway musical ever made and bewilders the kids in the audience.
There’s also a rather adult kind of humor in the ebullient VelJohnson’s big number, “Abundance and Charity,” in which glitzy Rockette-ish dancers parody gaudy greed.
A pretty scary scene in a cemetery leads to the happy finale, wherein everybody has a lot to eat (one forgets how important food is in Dickens), good will reigns and it snows in the Garden.
“A Christmas Carol: The Musical” spends too much time being a conventional musical, but when it remembers the terrors and joys of childhood, it’s irresistible.
Alastair Sim’s 1951 movie is the definitive “Christmas Carol,” but this version is live and it’s fun.
The Theater at MadisonSquare Garden, SeventhAvenue and 33rd Street,call (212) 307-4111.