Hale’s classic ‘Carol’ hits most of the right notes in its posh new home

Sandy • For years, I cursed West Valley City’s Hale Centre Theatre for its inconsideration of its sizable older audience. I’m talking stairs, bathrooms, lines, hearing, parking, legroom.

So when I took my 93-year-old mother to see Hale’s holiday chestnut, Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” at the new Mountain America Performing Arts Centre in Sandy, my editors and I were as interested in the accessibility of the building as the production.

The two-theater complex is a wonderful, thought-out, state-of-the-art, first-class facility, but there are glitches to address.

In the smaller Jewel Box amphitheater where “A Christmas Carol” is being staged through Dec. 23, the chairs are comfortable, the legroom impressive. The sound system is fantastic — you don’t even realize the actors are miked until a technician forgets to turn up the narrator’s mic, which happened annoyingly often.

The rake of the Jewel Box house is steep. If you’re on row 10, the second to the last, as we were, you look down from a mighty high elevation, which diminishes the theater’s advertised “intimacy,” but the trade-off is an unobstructed line of sight, something my mom, who is shrinking in height, appreciated.

When you enter the spacious lobby from the handicapped-parking level in the garage, there are, blessedly, no stairs. Only 10 parking stalls are labeled handicapped, and though sandwich boards mark a large handicapped section, that designated area was ambiguous, so the signs were ignored. We had a trek.

The lines at women’s bathrooms at intermission were slight. However, since only the one handicap stall had handrails, a must for many older people, that stall had a long line.

The theater was hot, many a playbill fluttered, but the sodas were surprisingly cheap ($2.50). Unfortunately, the selling of cookies at intermission enabled endless bag rattling throughout the second act.

Except for purchasing tickets, the Hale website isn’t very helpful. There’s little information, for example, on how to get to the theater (except for a map for parking). And the new theater’s impressive hearing gadgets aren’t mentioned on the website or in the theater. You have to know to ask.

Regardless, this “Christmas Carol” was engaging. The new stage afforded the creation of new costumes so eye-catching that several times during the performance I wondered at their skill and creativity.

The new stage (which is not in-the-round) necessitated a new type of set for Hale. This one successfully evoked the period without overwhelming the actors. Its circular rotating stage allowed for quick set changes with only brief interludes, and I’m sure that in time Hale’s ever-improving creative team will master the seamless scene change that other theaters routinely achieve.

All but one of the characters are stock characters, and Hale’s actors inhabited them well, if a tad earnestly. There’s a Mickey-and-Judy enthusiasm of putting on a show that comes through in Hale productions, but Dickens’ story is itself earnest, so it’s a good match.

The character of Scrooge, however, requires deeper acting as it’s a role that can tempt a performer into melodrama. If you overplay his bah-humbug cumudgeonliness into caricature, then his later stages of embarrassment, regret, compassion and reform aren’t believable. He must be a person you can identify with and grow with. Stephen Kerr as Scrooge did that for me. When the repentant Kerr lamented, “I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been,” and then asked if he is “past all hope,” he had me. He was a real person.

I’m a sucker for Dickens’ themes: the chains we forge in life and how our common welfare is our business — “charity, mercy, forbearance and benevolence.” This strong production provoked such thoughts. Listening to Ebenezer Scrooge, I naturally thought of our U.S. senator who last week said we don’t have enough money to fund the child health insurance program. Alas, poor Tiny Tim.

Hale spokespeople boast that their script is faithful to the text. Yes and no. Throughout, the production inserts beautifully arranged period Christmas carols that provide welcome color, but their lyrics about Christ makes Dickens’ story explicitly Christian.

Dickens’ story is famously not about Christ; it’s about getting and keeping the spirit of Christmas. His fiction helped create the secular Christmas — family, food, dance, relationships and charity. The Jesus narrative of the carols competes with the story’s crafted emotional impact. It’s fine for Hale to insert Christ in “A Christmas Carol,” but then it appeals only to the valley’s true-blue Christian believers, not at all what Dickens intended.

Even so, the mostly sold-out Hale holiday family event is so popular theatergoers are already calling the box office to buy tickets for next year, but only insiders would know. Curiously, the website doesn’t even list the 2018 production, which is an add-on to the company’s season.

For me, once was enough. Next year I’ll stick with reading Dickens’ original familiar carol.