A Victorian Christmas Carol in San Francisco

This season's remounting of A Christmas Carol by ACT brings a different life to the production. Director Domenique Lozano has added some clever fillips to Carey Perloff's original stage adaptation of the Victorian novel by Charles Dickens. This familiar story of Scrooge confronting ghosts is fast and lively with an effectively touching performance by James Carpenter as Mr. "Bah! Humbug!" himself. Other members of the large cast, including children, comport themselves with professional imagination, but Carpenter holds stage as the central figure in this story of failure and redemption.

On a set with crudely painted sliding flats, Carpenter leads ACT company members and a large group of newcomers along the path to the salvation of Ebenezer Scrooge. On a cold Christmas Eve, as Scrooge settles in for his gruel in a thrifty unheated room, his indigestion causes him to visualize spirits, ghosts of Christmases past, present and future, all teaching him how he has let down his fellow man through his parsimonious cynicism. When the Ghost of Christmas Future visits him, Scrooge is ready to repent his anti-social attitudes.

This seasonal family show is replete with monstrous visions, music, stunning but forthright scene shifts, and children costumed as vegetables. Scrooge is fascinated as the spirits lead him through what was, what should have been and what to expect next. The play centers on Scrooge and his reactions, but, bemused as he is, he stands mute among the people he has known and loved.

The dramatic highlight of the staging is the appearance of the Ghost of Christmas Future -- a tall, striking rod puppet -- but the excellent acting comes when Carpenter expresses Scrooge's joy that he is still alive on Christmas Day. Carpenter's performance is self-effacing; he acts with forced joy as though being happy is unfamiliar to him. He is awkward and stilted in his newly found magnanimity, but his infectious emotionalism projects loudly and clearly throughout the house, even when confronted by the particulars of Scrooge's death.

Scrooge lives, and brightens everybody's Christmas Day by unleashing his purse strings. The moral of Dickens' tale is timelessly relevant, and ACT's rendering of it succinctly and beautifully depicts the enlightenment of a miser.

A Christmas Carol continues through December 27 at American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary Street,San Francisco. Tickets are available online at www.act-sf.org or by phone at 415.749.2228.

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