The days are getting shorter, the weather is getting colder, and the decorations around us are becoming distinctly more focused on holly leaves. In the Western part of the world, at least, that means it’s A Christmas Carol season.
Off-Broadway’s Perelman Performing Arts Center is getting in on the merriment with a run of playwright Jack Thorne’s (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) adaptation of the classic Charles Dickens tale, currently playing a New York revival through January 4, 2026, after years of holiday runs at London’s Old Vic Theatre and a 2019 Broadway bow. There are a myriad of Christmas Carols out there one could produce, and many of them are out of copyright and royalty free. Why this one?
Well, says Tony winner Michael Ceveris, playing everyone’s favorite Christmas hater Ebenezer Scrooge this time around, it’s because Thorne’s Christmas Carol stands apart. Many of us have read the Dickens original and seen countless dramatizations in all mediums, enough that one can recite the famous lines—“God bless us, everyone!” But, Ceveris says, Dickens was not writing A Christmas Carol for theme parks, as it can sometimes feel today.
“He was such a progressive writer,” Cerveris says. The Broadway favorite is no stranger to playing difficult figures on stage. His Broadway resume includes playing Jerry Falwell in Tammy Faye, deeply angry father Bruce Bechdel in Fun Home, and the murderously vengeful title role in Sweeney Todd. “What we’re doing, really, is just paring away all the stuff that’s been loaded onto it over the years, to the story he was really telling.”
That story, Cerveris says, is not about Christmas trees and groups of carolers. In Dickens’ time, he was mainly focused on the plight of London’s destitute, a fate that often ended with people relegated to starvation, or perhaps worse, workhouses. Tiny Tim was not just a heartwarming image to Dickens, he represented a very tragic reality of London’s poor.
And sadly, in our current moment, one doesn’t need to look far to see lots of connections to where we are currently. The strength of Thorne’s Scrooge, Cerveris says, is that it humanizes both Dickens’ victims and oppressors. “In this version, Scrooge is somebody who has had experiences in his past that caused him to withdraw from the world,” he explains. “And he bought into this capitalist idea that money makes you safe and money makes you happy, that other people are a threat to your happiness—especially people that are unfamiliar or unlike you. All you have to do is open the newspaper, turn on the news, and you find all of those same things being fed to you all the time. This is why doing this version of the show right now means so much to me. It’s the real antidote to all the messaging that you’re getting from everywhere else.”
To this Tony winner, the reason we’re still telling A Christmas Carol all these years later, is not because Dickens so effectively wags his finger at us from the 19th century. It’s because Dickens wrote a story of change—and of hope.
“Scrooge’s conversion in this version is not just because some spectral figure tells him people are going to hate him when he’s dead,” Cerveris says. “His conversion is that he doesn’t want his younger self to turn out to be like me. That’s really profound. And it’s why they cast [Scrooge] a bit younger than you’re used to seeing, so there’s a sense that there’s still time for them to make a difference in the world.”
Cerveris hopes this Christmas Carol, and maybe all of the various Christmas Carols, will this year (more than ever) serve as a beacon of light in what can be an extremely dark world.
“I want audiences to leave feeling hope, a reinforcement towards their best instincts, encouragement that they’re not alone in this current moment,” he says, tearing up. “This show softens even the hardest, most anti-Christmas type of person. It softens the Scrooge in everybody.”
