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Beate Hein Bennett
Caroling
Through the World…oy Dickens! December 26, 2025– January 11, 2026
Trust Vit Horejs to expand Charles Dickens’s classic “A Christmas Carol” to include various traditions celebrated during the Christmas and Hanukkah season, to include Kwanzaa, and adding Ramadan for good measure. All these holidays may very well be rooted in the ancient winter solstice rituals that celebrate Light to illuminate the Dark with the sharing of food, gifts, light, and music to symbolize the shared need for a common human bond. That is the moral ideal shared by all those holy days or festivals.
Charles Dickens illustrates in his morality tale what happens to the person who violates this bond by being-- well, a Scrooge, who mistreats, maltreats, belittles, and cheats everyone, and generally behaves like a miser, who ultimately exiles himself by his stinginess from all human company. He will be left a miserable lonely old man who will go to his grave un-mourned and be dispatched straight to Hell. This fate is dangled before him on Christmas Eve by a series of midnight apparitions, each one more horrific, who illustrate the effects of his malicious actions, primarily the starvation and death of those who depend on him for their livelihood.
Theater for the New City is presenting the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre production of “The Christmas Carol”, by now a venerable tradition in New York, which has undergone a variety of iterations over the years, always adjusting to the prevailing conditions of the year of performance. The founder-director Vit Horejs who is the master puppeteer lends his voice to all the characters but lets his puppets do the performing. He is a tall Prospero-like figure, clad in a long robe, who stage manages the small puppet theater in the large Community Space of TNC. The large space is shared by Katarina Vizina and Valois Mickens, two excellent singer/actors in 19th century dress who punctuate each scene with a traditional carol, sung in Czech or Slovak, and other languages, even in Swahili. They incorporate humor in their musical renderings and actions as stage assistants to Mr. Horejs.
The ‘stars’ of the show are the many wonderful marionettes: Most are by Milos Kasal and “unknown folk artists”. Bob Cratchit (with his coal bucket) and the furious Laudrywoman (formerly Witch) are from the Toy Theatre of Vera Horejsova. A Dancing Quartet and the painted background drops are from the historical toy theater scenery donated by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright who was of Czech Jewish origin. The small puppet stage and the general set with imaginative props are designed by Michelle Beshaw who also designed the costumes. Lighting by Andrew LaPointe creates the atmosphere and enables the audience to see the small marionettes quite clearly and follow their intricate actions that include walking, dancing, sleeping, playing the violin, or climbing stairs—actually a stack of books with funny titles: “The Art of The Steal”; “The Bankers”; “Karl Marx, Das Kapital”; “Squeeze Tenants Dry”; and “The Dollar Tree”. Scrooge even has to fly through the air with some of his ghosts and land on unexpected places. Humor lurks throughout whether in the puppets’ actions, or our “Prospero’s” cool improvised (?) reactions to an occasional stage mishap. Part of the charm is the totally open manipulation of the marionettes and the setting of each scene.
The production is an absolute delight, and the matinee performance
I saw was appreciated by an audience that included children of various
ages. |
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