Not every ‘A Christmas Carol’ musical will grace us on the blog, but we can’t help but point out the odd AND big-budgeted.
Sprightly folk decorates GreenMatthews’s A Christmas Carol: A Folk Opera. This feels like a reading of the novelette set to popular folk dance reels. Different.
Q Brothers Christmas Carol is the present day mockup rap of the old Scroogery. And, boy, is Scrooge crotchety. Aggro! as in “Stave 1” (his sack of money and his home security system are treated as characters). Marley is, wait for it, Rastafarian. I get it! In “Stave 2” the past revisits OTHER Dickens characters Pip and Martin Chuzzlewit as the Scrooge posse. And Fezzywig is Fezzy’s Wigs Shoppe. Funny stuff. In “Stave 3” the Cratchits have rabies, tinnitus, and are on the transplant list (hacking solo). “Stave 4” is the Future, but it’s oddly electronic. Then it gets sympathetically sentimental. I bought it: the wit, the energy, the meaning.
