This holiday season Desert Crown Theatre produced a festive and entertaining production of my stage adaption of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. A Christmas Carol is the ageless story of redemption where Ebenezer Scrooge having turned his back on love and his fellow man is visited by three Christmas spirits who teach him the error of his ways. In this fun and lively adaptation, you’ll still find all the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future along with Tiny Tim, Bob Cratchit, the Ghost of Jacob Marley, Old Fezziwig, Scrooge’s nephew Fred, and the love of Scrooge’s life, Belle. There are some scary bits, a few good laughs, a tender moment or two, and some surprises! It’s a fresh take on an old tale sure to thrill young and old alike.
Desert Crown Theatre is based in Vail, Arizona a small community of about 15,000 not too far from Tucson. Last year a group of Vail residents got together to start a new community theatre company in order to provide opportunities for youth to explore and experience the arts including drama. I sat down with Christine Ralston one of the founding members of Desert Crown Theatre and her husband Nate Ralston who is playing Scrooge this year to talk with them about Desert Crown Theatre and this year’s production of A Christmas Carol.
CHRISTINE RALSTON
I grew up in an extremely performance-oriented family. We played instruments, we did theatre, we did film, we did dance. It was really important to my parents to let us explore. Not all of us acted, not all of us sang, not all of us danced. I’m in the middle of seven siblings. There’s a lot of us. But they really wanted us to have an outlet.
All of our children are older teenagers or adults now but when they started going through middle and high school I was shocked when I found out there weren’t clubs with those types of activities available. And our schools are great schools it’s just after years of seeing no choir or drama club we decided to form Desert Crown Theatre.
I’m the director of youth programs so my passion is to do things like our summer camps and our hope is to provide kids and the community with an artistic outlet and to keep it at a low enough cost so that it’s not pricing children out. Because they might not ever try it otherwise, and we’ve already discovered some kids who are extremely talented and have really bright futures in performing who came to summer camp and who had never done anything before.
NATE RALSTON
I did some community theatre where I grew up. Even where I grew up, there was a community theatre. I didn’t start Desert Crown Theatre but I’m supportive of it because I had that opportunity as a youth. I was in three plays as a teenager. Crazy for You, Number the Stars, and Babes in Toyland. And I really liked it. I thought it was a lot of fun. And last year when we were doing A Christmas Carol I really liked the role of Marley. It seemed like it would be fun to be the mean and angry ghost. And this year I wanted the opportunity to try the main role and there are some challenges to it as well, but I enjoy that.
JAMES HUTCHISON
One of the fun things about this year’s show is your entire family is involved. Nate, you’re playing Scrooge. Christine, you’re the stage manager and also the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come. You’ve got your son Raedin playing Young Scrooge and your daughters Krystin, Éowyn, and Evelynn are also part of the cast and Afton is helping backstage. So, this is the second year the entire Ralston family has been involved with the production of A Christmas Carol. What’s it like having the whole family working on the show and what are some of your family traditions you celebrate this time of year?
CHRISTINE
It’s great. It’s building a really fun memory this year, especially with our son playing young Scrooge opposite his dad’s Scrooge. It’s brilliant because he looks like him and can mimic him so well that it makes for a very believable character.
NATE
The difficulty is that whenever we stand next to each other I have to get on my tippy toes so it doesn’t look too odd because he’s a couple of inches taller than me.
CHRISTINE
It’s definitely building a new tradition for our family. And as far as our other family traditions, we don’t really have too many. I grew up in a family and we observed Hanukkah from my dad’s side, but we also did Christmas. And we still do both.
NATE
What we do for Hanukkah is celebrate with latkes and dreidel. And now that the kids are older dreidel has kind of passed by the wayside. We have some end-of-year traditions. There’s a place we walk to and see the Christmas lights. We have our traditions about how we celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve and the way we have a Christmas Eve dinner and Christmas Day dinner.
CHRISTINE
And every year, at least one or two of us has participated in our church’s Christmas music program.
JAMES
Nate last year as you mentioned you played Jacob Marley and this year you’re playing Scrooge and the play deals with redemption and forgiveness. And I’m wondering how playing Scrooge, a man in desperate need of redemption and forgiveness, has made you think about those two aspects of life.
NATE
I have to be fully honest. I’m a religious man, and that’s a normal part of my life. It’s a daily part of my life; asking for forgiveness; looking for redemption. I believe that all men are sinners and have fallen short of the glory of God and the play focuses a lot on the idea of redemption. One of the lines in the show is Bob Cratchit telling his family what Tiny Tim had said in church earlier. And he had said that he hopes everybody can see him as a cripple so that they can remember who it was that made blind men see and lame men walk. A Christmas Carol without mentioning any names focuses quite a bit on Jesus Christ, and I think if I were to have a wish it would be that this show can help bring people closer to the saviour – to the redeemer. So, for me personally, this has not really added to or changed the way that I view forgiveness and redemption instead I guess I’d say it further strengthens my belief in it.
CHRISTINE
In the play, you can really see that the Cratchit family is a religious family. They read Psalms together when they’re in mourning and they go to Church and it shows that they have that connection and that faith that things are going to be okay, and they’re going to make it through. A Christmas Carol is a show that is all about finding hope. It’s not like redemption goes away at the end of your life. Even in your later years, it’s still attainable because it’s never too late for forgiveness or to change. I think that’s a good message that A Christmas Carol shares with everybody who comes to see it.
JAMES
I don’t think until Scrooge is pleading near the end of the play in the graveyard with the Ghost of Christmas Future and he asks for forgiveness that he has a chance for redemption.
CHRISTINE
The graveyard scene is really intense. Especially for us because it’s the two of us up there alone in the graveyard with the tombstone. And we play my character the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come as a lady in full Victorian mourning with a veil. And Scrooge is asking for mercy. This man who at the beginning of the play would never have asked for something like that.
We really try to give that scene a bit of desperation. Nate ends up on the ground in full tears and is really desperate because he thinks that he can’t do anything and the spirit has turned her back on him and it’s a really powerful moment. Not only is he asking for mercy he is also realizing he has to ask for forgiveness. Mercy isn’t just given. Mercy needs to be earned as well.
That’s one of our favourite scenes especially because the following scene is so different. He has pledged that he’s going to change and he wakes up in his bedroom a completely new person. And I think that’s really symbolic.
JAMES
Every theatre company brings their own vision to the telling of the story. Tell me a little bit about the vision for this year’s production as you bring it to the stage.
CHRISTINE
Audiences come to A Christmas Carol for the atmosphere. There had been discussion of do we modernize this or do we change the time period. And the overall consensus was, no. People want to be transported back to a simpler time. People want a classic tale told in its own time which means gorgeous costumes. And we wanted to make our atmosphere immersive so the second you walk through the door we have a choir and they’re phenomenal singers in Victorian garb, and we have a Christmas tree auction set up, and we want our audience to walk in and be filled with the Christmas spirit. That’s kind of our goal with this show.
JAMES
When I was writing the play I wanted to create a scene that showed how Bob Cratchit is a really good dad and that he’s playful and there’s this wonderful humour and love in the family. And that’s the scene where we see the Cratchit family on Christmas day.
CHRISTINE
I think how you wrote it gives credit to Bob because despite the fact that he comes from this cold, harsh workplace and working for Scrooge he is able to leave that at his door when he comes home to his family. And so, you have this bubbly happy home and they’re playful and excited. Most portrayals don’t really put that in.
NATE
One of the difficult aspects of playing Scrooge is trying to figure out when he’s going to start having this change of heart because he’s super cold and angry, and then he goes on this journey and sees things in the past and it hurts him a little bit, but does it really make sense for that to be the thing that immediately changes his heart?
There’s got to be this gradual change and in the scene where Bob Cratchit and his family are celebrating Christmas and they’re so happy and it’s so much fun he sees what it’s like to have a happy home. I don’t think it makes any sense for Scrooge to start to feel any happiness unless he’s seen how happy Bob is with his family. So, one of the things that I try to show is how the happiness Bob is experiencing with his family is having an effect on Scrooge.
JAMES
One of the other things I have in my version of the play is that Mrs. Cratchit actually does get to give Scrooge a piece of her mind. That’s something she says she’d like to do in the book, but she never gets the chance.
CHRISTINE
Oh, absolutely. And our Mrs. Cratchit plays it so beautifully. She is a sweet and loving mother and she’s so kind and when she stands up for Bob in the street scene on Christmas Day, she does give Scrooge a piece of her mind because she’s a woman of her word. And then of course, Scrooge immediately triples Bob’s salary and she’s taken aback. I think sometimes Mrs. Cratchit gets left behind. So, it’s nice to let her have a moment.
I actually had the actress ask me, what’s her first name? And I said, go read the book. She doesn’t have one. Because it was written that way. In the book, she was just Mrs. Cratchit. And one of the things we have hidden on stage is an original edition of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.
JAMES
So, maybe the spirit of Charles Dickens might be there to help you guys out.
CHRISTINE
That’s what I think. This book is from the eighteen-hundreds and it’s on our set and the audience doesn’t know it, but we know it. And we’ve got a cast of about 45 people, 20 of which are children. And it helps our board to see that so many people believe in us and support us. And when you have a large cast they bring more people to the theatre and I really stress to the cast as much as I can that you don’t know who you’re going to inspire, whether it’s an audience of 30 or 300 or 3000, you don’t know who you might inspire out there.
We had a little girl show up to auditions with her dad, who we’ve known for a few years and we convinced him to come in and read and guess who’s playing Fezziwig. He did not expect to audition. He had never done this sort of thing before and we just said to give it a go. And it turned out he had a talent for it and he had just never put himself out there. And he is having so much fun and doing the show with his daughters. His one teenage daughter is the assistant stage manager and the little one is playing Ignorance. And it’s just been so much fun to have that many people involved.
