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20th November 2020 • 20th November 2020 • Read for 5 minutes • Join the conversation 
From left, playwright David van Belle, actor Ted Dykstra as Scrooge, and director Daryl Cloran as the Citadel are remaking A Christmas Carol with the Rice Theater as the soundstage and filming the production in a digital format for them to release during the holidays Season online in Edmonton, November 12, 2020. Ed Kaiser / Postmedia Photo by Ed Kaiser /20091944A
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“I’m trying to save Christmas!” Laughs Daryl Cloran from the Citadel and sounds more like a superhero than a theater director.
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But the truth is, the Art Director’s latest venture – turning the annual over two-hour live stage production of the Dickens classic from The Citadel into a 90-minute digital version to watch at home – is in many ways a Marvel comic in the making.
It takes ingenuity (superpowers by a different name, right?) To get from stage to screen during COVID-19, and bionics (or at least extravagant makeup that is protected by plastic face shields between takes). Not to mention martial arts (well, dancing).
And while you don’t confuse it with The Justice League, there is definitely heroic teamwork involved; the nearly quarter of a million dollar project would not be possible without generous donations from donors such as EPCOR’s Heart and Soul Fund and the Edmonton Community Foundation.
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On a breakneck schedule, the whole thing will be posted on the Citadel website on December 15th. Playwright (now screenwriter) David van Belle got the required rewrite done in a matter of weeks, and the entire show was filmed in just eight days earlier this month. While it can take many months to edit a full-length film in less strenuous conditions, the editing of A Christmas Carol will be squeezed into the next few weeks.
“We weren’t sure whether that was too ambitious,” says van Belle while observing the action on the penultimate day of shooting. “But everything went great and here we are.”
It’s only been a year since the original Citadel stage production of A Christmas Carol, adapted by Tom Woods and started in 2000, was scrapped for a new iteration in 2019. Van Belle took the story from the Victorian era and tossed it inside a department store called Marley’s, around 1949. It’s a more modern take where the character of Bob Cratchit has been replaced by single mother Emily Cratchit. The street in front of the department store is teeming with immigrants who speak different languages.
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Featuring Toronto’s multi-award-winning actor, composer, and writer Ted Dykstra (a native of St. Albert) as the quirky Scrooge, the adaptation draws heavily on a canon of popular Christmas carols from the 1940s and 50s. In order to bring the screen story to a tasty 90 minutes, some of the music numbers have been removed and the dialogues of the show have been tightened and compressed.
If you’re concerned that a low-budget, shorter, and quick-put digital iteration will be stunted compared to Maclab production, here’s what you know: The creative team came up with “an interesting film and theater hybrid,” according to Cloran, that the best of both worlds combined.
A television-style soundstage with three cameras was set up in the Rice Theater. The lobby is crammed with clothes racks and a makeup area, while nearby kids waiting for their scenes to sit with their guardians and play board games.
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The lavish set from last year’s $ 1 million show is back, along with Cory Sincennes’ detailed costumes. All characters from the 2019 production are present, except for one. Martha, played by Corie Ryan, was dropped because the actor is out of college and her replacement was too complicated for this time-pressed effort.
Since live crooning is now considered to be pouring a bucket of coronavirus over the mother, the songs in the upcoming film adaptation were recorded separately under safe conditions. The actors synchronize the melodies where they appear in the script. Another accommodation inspired by COVID-19 can be found in the dance scenes, which swirled swarms of couples in close proximity during the Fezziwig Christmas party scene last year. A close shot of just four, physically distant couples, looks both full and festive in this year’s digital version.
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“I think what we discovered with this approach because of the limitations of COVID is that we were actually able to create something more intimate,” says Cloran. “… because we are able to use more film techniques like close-ups to do something that is more directly related to the viewer.”
Cloran says the high definition digital version will look great on a big screen TV or laptop.
Covered up like a mummy, I saw the show filmed last week and found it to be a fascinating exercise in upside / downside. Here’s a perk: if Scrooge drops a line or Turkey Boy (the boy in charge of delivering the Cratchits Christmas bird) accidentally twirls his Christmas hula hoops right on set – that’s no big deal.
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“Scene 20, Take 2. Stop for snow and then action!” Shouts the first assistant director, and voilà, mistakes deleted.
It was also encouraging to see some of the best actors in town, like Julien Arnold as Jacob Marley, get back to work for the first time in many months.
“Repent, repent,” boomed the gray-faced, chain-rattling Marley as a ghostly mist swirled around his feet. It gave me goosebumps.
Another plus, says Dykstra (who has a lot of film experience), is that it can be easier for actors to emote on a camera that is meters away.
“You can get really intimate without worrying about someone in the back hearing you,” he says. “… The camera records your condition quite well, and you don’t have to generate the emotions that you might need in a big theater to be understood.”
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Of course, something is lost in translation from the stage. Actors telling a funny, scary, and heartwarming story right before your eyes is one of the most magical human experiences that is impossible to fully reproduce on a screen.
Even the film version fails to evoke a sense of community, that feeling of togetherness that is the happy by-product of one of the most enduring and lovable events of the Christmas season. The emotional content doesn’t end with the final scene either, but continues afterwards when Dykstra sheds his Scrooge personality and appeals to the Maclab audience to donate to Edmonton’s Food Bank.
I will miss seeing performers with donation buckets in the lobby, a gesture that has helped pour more than a million dollars into feeding the community over the past two decades. That won’t happen this year, and the sadness is undeniable.
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But David van Belle, with his thoughtful writer’s soul, has comforting words. He points out the moving lyrics of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, one of the show’s signature melodies.
“One day we will all be together, if fate allows it. Until then we have to rummage through somehow. “
Van Belle sees A Christmas Carol, circa 2020, as a way to help people regain and maintain their Christmas spirit.
“We experience a lot of abnormalities,” he says. “I hope this is a way for people to get some magic back.”
To order the digital version of A Christmas Carol, visit The Citadel website at citadeltheatre.com. A 48-hour streaming code costs $ 40 per household plus GST and fees. The show runs from December 15th to December 31st.
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