“A Christmas Carol,” the evergreen Dickens tale, has had a long afterlife, with a hefty catalog of film and stage adaptations, operas and even a cartoon musical version starring Mr. Magoo (with a score by Jule Styne and Bob Merrill). But even if you have a favorite version that you revisit every year – say, “Scrooge,” the magnificent 1951 film starring Alastair Sim, or perhaps the book itself – the Origin Theater has a production that might cut through the competition.
The company is presenting the work in the style of a 19th-century salon at the American Irish Historical Society, a turn-of-the-century house on Fifth Avenue at East 80th Street, Dec. 8 to 12. The production, directed by Matt Torney (“Tiny Dynamite”) and starring Greg Mullavey (“Clever Little Lies”), is based on the version that Dickens prepared and annotated for his own public readings (starting in 1853, a decade after the novella was published). The original version of this edition is in the collection of the New York Public Library. Dickens gave 127 readings of this version in Britain and the United States.
To keep the salon atmosphere more or less authentic (purists could object that the society’s home is too modern, having been completed three decades after Dickens’s death), the work will be staged in a room that seats only 40, and will include servings of mulled wine and mince pie. A small children’s choir will be on hand to sing period Christmas carols.