teenybuffalo (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
teenybuffalo) wrote2017-11-12 03:13 pm
teenybuffalo) wrote2017-11-12 03:13 pm
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I am truly sorry to find you so resolute
I'm formatting/editing the script for a production of "A Christmas Carol" for [side job] and having a great time. Man oh man, I love this book. The actual production is happening somewhere I can't attend, but I think it'll be a good show.
Yeah, I know it's early, but never too early to plan some fun. What holiday-centered stuff are you looking forward to doing this year? I love secular Christmas stuff -- caroling, making cheap decorations e.g., greens and Dollar Store ribbon, baking, cutting paper snowflakes, and doing pleasant indoorsy things like reading aloud to friends.
Random thoughts as I go through A Christmas Carol:
--I want to see a live show of ACC because I want to see how a good actor handles Bob Cratchit. I want to see him repressing his resentment because he needs to keep his job. There was a different stage adaptation of ACC I edited last year where Scrooge, while yelling at Bob for asking for Christmas off work, says, "I'd have thought you would mind losing a day's wages, with all those children, and one a cripple." I want to see that moment onstage, with the look on Bob's face as he feels the urge to shout, "How dare you talk that way about my son," and then bites his tongue.
--I have this deep fondness for the apparition of Jacob Marley, and it's hard to explain why. Anybody who is entirely composed of Regrets(tm) is relatable, I suppose. Also, all the humor in this scene comes from Marley talking in florid language and frightening imagery, which I love, and sounding like a character from a highfalutin stage tragedy while Scrooge spits and sneers and talks like a disrespectful modern asshole. Comedy gold, as far as I'm concerned. (Though they've made Marley's lines sound a lot more conversational in this version. For sure, the original dialogue is hard for actors to put across without sounding silly. I like the way they did it in ACC (aka "Scrooge") with Alistair Sim as Scrooge and Michael Hordern as Jacob Marley. Sim is naturalistic and Hordern comes across like an old-school Sir Henry Irving-era tragedian.)
--My liking for the two charity workers who hit Scrooge up for a donation doesn't do anything to make me more patient with the creepy intrusive sidewalk canvassers for Planned Parenthood and the like, the ones who yell personal remarks at me and get in my face when I'm just trying to get to work. Perhaps it is I who misanthropy.
--Not to devalue the whole "care for other people if you want to retain a shred of decency" theme, but a secondary message in this book is "You'll be happier if you're not miserable to everyone," and it's easy to interpret that as "it's never too late to start clawing your way out of depression." Scrooge's snubbing of Fred comes across as the attitude of someone who has let the brainweasels take over -- the thoughts that say, "Everyone nice is lying to you, the only reason anyone would be kind to you is because they want something, and people will screw you if you give 'em an inch." That's why it's so affecting for me when he gets to visit Fred's party invisibly; he's practicing all these new concepts like "joining in the fun" and "not saying anything nasty" and at the end of the story he gets to go back and do the real thing.
--Likewise, not to discredit the pain of poor Fred, who is enacting a scene I witnessed often in my childhood -- young adults trying to make unkind older relatives return their affection or at least be nice to them. (I'm recalling a few ghastly family holidays with my father and his siblings trying to pretend that my grandmother was a marginally decent person.) He's a hell of a guy, in a quiet way, reaching back out to Scrooge though he gets continually rebuffed, then laughing it off. No wonder so many people relate so hard to this book.
OK, back to it.
Yeah, I know it's early, but never too early to plan some fun. What holiday-centered stuff are you looking forward to doing this year? I love secular Christmas stuff -- caroling, making cheap decorations e.g., greens and Dollar Store ribbon, baking, cutting paper snowflakes, and doing pleasant indoorsy things like reading aloud to friends.
Random thoughts as I go through A Christmas Carol:
--I want to see a live show of ACC because I want to see how a good actor handles Bob Cratchit. I want to see him repressing his resentment because he needs to keep his job. There was a different stage adaptation of ACC I edited last year where Scrooge, while yelling at Bob for asking for Christmas off work, says, "I'd have thought you would mind losing a day's wages, with all those children, and one a cripple." I want to see that moment onstage, with the look on Bob's face as he feels the urge to shout, "How dare you talk that way about my son," and then bites his tongue.
--I have this deep fondness for the apparition of Jacob Marley, and it's hard to explain why. Anybody who is entirely composed of Regrets(tm) is relatable, I suppose. Also, all the humor in this scene comes from Marley talking in florid language and frightening imagery, which I love, and sounding like a character from a highfalutin stage tragedy while Scrooge spits and sneers and talks like a disrespectful modern asshole. Comedy gold, as far as I'm concerned. (Though they've made Marley's lines sound a lot more conversational in this version. For sure, the original dialogue is hard for actors to put across without sounding silly. I like the way they did it in ACC (aka "Scrooge") with Alistair Sim as Scrooge and Michael Hordern as Jacob Marley. Sim is naturalistic and Hordern comes across like an old-school Sir Henry Irving-era tragedian.)
--My liking for the two charity workers who hit Scrooge up for a donation doesn't do anything to make me more patient with the creepy intrusive sidewalk canvassers for Planned Parenthood and the like, the ones who yell personal remarks at me and get in my face when I'm just trying to get to work. Perhaps it is I who misanthropy.
--Not to devalue the whole "care for other people if you want to retain a shred of decency" theme, but a secondary message in this book is "You'll be happier if you're not miserable to everyone," and it's easy to interpret that as "it's never too late to start clawing your way out of depression." Scrooge's snubbing of Fred comes across as the attitude of someone who has let the brainweasels take over -- the thoughts that say, "Everyone nice is lying to you, the only reason anyone would be kind to you is because they want something, and people will screw you if you give 'em an inch." That's why it's so affecting for me when he gets to visit Fred's party invisibly; he's practicing all these new concepts like "joining in the fun" and "not saying anything nasty" and at the end of the story he gets to go back and do the real thing.
--Likewise, not to discredit the pain of poor Fred, who is enacting a scene I witnessed often in my childhood -- young adults trying to make unkind older relatives return their affection or at least be nice to them. (I'm recalling a few ghastly family holidays with my father and his siblings trying to pretend that my grandmother was a marginally decent person.) He's a hell of a guy, in a quiet way, reaching back out to Scrooge though he gets continually rebuffed, then laughing it off. No wonder so many people relate so hard to this book.
OK, back to it.
no subject
Your brainweasels theory is intriguing. Elaborating upon it: Was Fred perhaps an orphan, raised by Scrooge? Was Fred-as-a-boy the last person Scrooge allowed himself to express affection for? And did Fred then "betray" that affection by falling in love? That would fit the one bit of textual suggestion as to why Scrooge is so awful to Fred: 'Why did you get married?' We don't know precisely why Scrooge objected to the marriage, but one can guess that the bride's (lack of) riches was a factor. Worse yet, the notion that love could be more important than money cuts to the heart of Scrooge's ideas about value, and threatens his own self-valuation.
While we're on the topic, have I ever shown you my favorite bit of Christmas Carol crack-fic? http://www.peterdavid.net/2010/04/30/what-the-dickens/
no subject
It really deserves its classic status: it's all time travel with ghosts and then it's very real ways that people are hurt and that people don't always have to be the shape they were hurt into. It can be simplistic when retold, but it doesn't have to be. My canonical versions are either the original novella or Alastair Sim, but I remember my grandparents taking me to a stage production in Portland I really enjoyed when I was a child, and I hope this particular stage version is good.