Perry Players hit holiday high note with musical ‘Christmas Carol’

You know the story, the one of the journey of Ebenezer Scrooge through a Christmas Eve night with three spirits authored by Charles Dickens. But, you may have never seen it told quite this way.

It’s the Perry Players Theatre, it’s the holiday season and it’s a production based on a Dickens tale, so it must be a musical. Hunter Hufnagel, one year after directing “Oliver!” on the Perry stage and just a few months after putting on “The Addams Family,” brings “A Christmas Carol: The Musical” for a weekend of sold-out shows.

Everyone you would expect to see is there, from Bob Cratchit and his son Tiny Tim, Scrooge’s former partner Jacob Marley and the ghosts. Many familiar faces from the previous mentioned shows make up “A Christmas Carol’s” cast, including Stuart Appleton as Cratchit, Aaron Benda as Scrooge’s nephew Fred Anderson, Brett Copeland as the Ghost of Christmas Present and Emily Bodony as Sally Anderson. Alana Horne is a dancing Ghost of Christmas Past, Christian Kemp is Tiny Tim and Christopher Kemp is Marley.

Hufnagel himself takes on the role of Scrooge, but is quick to point out the rest of the cast carries the show on around the central character.

“I was a major Charles Dickens fan when I was in school,” said Hufnagel. “We did ‘A Christmas Carol’ at Houston County High School a few years ago and did very well at one-act. People loved the show.”

This presentation is a one-act play with musical dialogue and dancing throughout. He sees it as a “Christmas present” to the community to bring it back.

“The music is wonderful,” said Hufnagel. Alan Menken of Disney movie soundtrack fame wrote the music for this adaptation, and Lynn Ahrens wrote the lyrics. “(Menken’s) done a lot of the best Disney music. (‘A Christmas Carol’) did very well on Broadway. They did it every year for Christmas for 15 years at Madison Square Garden. It’s really catchy.

“It is a fairly dark story, but it is very family friendly. It’s kind of frightening in some areas with Marley and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. Lots of dancing and cool light tricks. We have a surprise for the audience at the end of the show we’ve kept well wrapped.

“When you have a cast this size, you have a little community going. We have the cream of the crop. We had almost 90 people audition. Most of the time you get eight to 10 weeks for a musical of this scale. We put it together in five and a half. The cast could not have been better.”

As usual, there’s an impressive array of sets and costumes for a Dickens-like era. Hufnagel said thousands went into the colorful costumes, not to mention time and effort and a lot of manpower for the overall presentation.

“Scrooge, he’s there the whole time, but everything happens around him,” he said. “Everyone else is responsible for taking Scrooge along. That’s the heart of the Christmas story, that Christmas is about family and faith and enjoying the season.”

HHJ News