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| Richard Powers Hardt |
Between A Nightmare Before Christmas and literally any story relating to Krampus, there are plenty of spooky holiday stories and tales floating around, but none so classic and timeless as Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The story of Ebenezer Scrooge’s greed, hatred of Christmas and eventual turn to goodness gives even the Grinch a run for his money.
Richard Powers Hardt is a writer, a director and an actor and under his direction his adaptation of A Christmas Carol is coming to TheatreWorks for another holiday season. The iconic story has gone through more adaptations that one can imagine, from stage plays, to children's movies, to Disney’s Scrooge McDuck, but Powers Hardt's adaptation sticks as closely to the original Dickens classic as possible.
With the Holiday season kicking into high gear, and Christmas shows popping up across the Valley, Hardt took a few moments to talk to me about why his show is a must see, and some of the secrets behind the scenes.
When did you first decide to adapt A Christmas Carol for TheaterWorks?
“In 2011 the artistic director at TheatreWorks Robyn Allen decided to do an adaptation of A Christmas Carol, and when we announced shows we used to do scenes or songs from the shows that we were going to do that year. She needed a scene for A Christmas Carol because we had already decided we were going to do a new adaptation, and I said ‘Well look, you’ve only got a month, I’ll write the first scene for you and then you can use that for the announcement and then we’ll find an adaptation we like,’ and she liked the first scene so much she contracted me to write the rest.”
What is different about your adaptation?
“My adaptation is actually very, very close to the book. I literally have a lot of lines that are straight out of the book. What I did was I went and researched Dickens really heavily and found out what a social warrior he was and how ahead of his time he was in a lot of ways. He was also very much into ghosts, when he wrote A Christmas Carol it was very much a ghost story and not a Christmas story in his mind. It was far more about the spirits and not the Christmas holiday, but of course it was built around Christmas. I tried to incorporate a lot of the spookiness of the ghosts and at the same time a lot of his views around social justice and the rich as opposed to the poor and class warfare.”
Have you made any additional changes since TheaterWorks brought your adaptation back last year for this season's production?
“Every year. Every year I make changes, in fact since we did it last year, I rewrote about a fourth of the script. I actually played a role in it last year, and while I was playing the role I noticed there were moments that didn’t flow as smoothly as I liked or scenes that dragged a little longer than I liked so I went in and revamped the script over the summer.”
“They gave me a hard time because being a director first and then a writer, I tend to write very very long involved stage directions about how things should look and how things should feel. They gave me a hard time because the first thing I always say when I go into direct is forget the stage directions. When I wrote A Christmas Carol I wrote tons of stage direction. A lot of the difficulty with A Christmas Carol is that it’s a spectacle and there are a lot of special effects...so many things going on and it’s really a beautiful, beautiful adaptation when you see it on stage with all the technical aspects.”
What can you tell me about the cast of the show?
“I am very, very, very pleased with the cast we have this year. I was lucky enough to get a former Zoni best actor winner Rob Evans to play Scrooge. I was shocked because usually this time of year with this size of cast, you have to accept that some people in some roles who may not be as strong as others but really we were very lucky because the people we cast and even the ones I didn't know well or wasn’t sure of have just been amazing. The talent we have, from top to bottom, from the smallest role to the largest just surprised me. Even my teenagers are just very, very talented people.”
A Christmas Carol is an iconic story that spans generations. Why do you think it's so loved?
“Well I mean, you’re right that it is an iconic story and the reason stories become iconic is because they touch a nerve with us. We all hope we can redeem ourselves, there’s not one [person] alive who hasn’t done something in the past that they would like to take back that we regret. With Scrooge it’s pretty much everything but when we see that someone like Scrooge can be redeemed, it is much easier for us to believe we can redeem our own errors and our own mistakes. I think that’s what touches a nerve with people. We love to see the unredeemable, the person we think truly has no hope, be redeemed because it gives us hope for everyone.”
What do you hope audiences take away from your adaptation?
“The spirits are there and obviously it’s very supernatural but at the same time, the show can often be done as a caricature. Scrooge is often overplayed as this person who isn’t really real he’s just this embodiment of hate and greed where I work really hard with my actors to create people who are realistic and whom people can believe in, that they can look at and say ‘yeah, I know that person.’ Even Scrooge is a very honest portrayal, Rob is just brilliant. I guess what I want if for there to be a sense of realism, that anyone of us could walk into the story and be a part of it all.”
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