Although Neil McGarry’s website says the Bay Colony Shakespeare Company’s production of this Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was “born” in 2013, McGarry recalls the first glimmers of the idea emerged much earlier:

“The ‘germ of the idea’ actually came about in 8th grade English at Barnstable Middle School. I’m just remembering this as I type. We were reading the book aloud in class and I had been asked to read. I was the third reader and wound up reading for the next half hour. I want to say that it was the Scrooge/Marley scene but that might be wishful thinking. One of those strange ‘connector’ moments in time.

“Later, I played the role of Scrooge in my senior year of high school, an extremely important moment. I received a kind of parental blessing, the phrase ‘If you decide to do this, you’ll be okay’ came from my mother. It was years before I did anything that she or my dad enjoyed as much and, at different times in the years to come, as Christmas would approach, my mum would occasionally ask me to read from the book while she prepped dinner.

“Finally, in 1990, she asked, ‘When are you going to do A Christmas Carol again?’ That prompted me to do create a ‘book in hand’ reading that I did intermittently over the next 10 years or so.”

McCarry’s version of A Christmas Carol takes shape, from the kitchen to the stage…
“My parents died in 2009 & 2010. Finally, in 2013, in the midst of the first year of The Bay Colony Shakespeare Company, having just completed Hamlet and all of the bills being paid, I saw that the five-person A Christmas Carol I had planned was impossible, as there were no funds left. My associate artistic director, Ross MacDonald, said, ‘Wait, didn’t you used to do A Christmas Carol as a solo reading? Why don’t we do it as a solo show? I’ll direct it. We’ll do it
for your dear mum.’

“With that, for the next three months we gathered at my kitchen counter to argue about cuts, and at my dining room table to stage the show. From all of the years I had been doing the piece as a reading, I discovered that I knew large junks of the text already and worked over those three months to finally memorize the performance text. Of course, none of this touches on the impact of the Mr. Magoo version or the animated one that used Alistair Sim’s voice and, on a black and white TV, looked like extraordinary pencil sketches come to life, or, especially on the devastating performance of Albert Finney in the movie musical of Scrooge.”

Over the years, McGarry has brought the magic of The Christmas Carol to audiences in many lands, and from all walks of life…

“What has changed over the years, I think, are the echoes. When I first began, the voices of all the actors who’ve come before me, the famous and non-famous voices, were far more present than they are now.

“Also, there was something about carting the show across Europe, through airports, train stations and city streets – wheeling the trunk through London’s King’s Cross and Victoria Street Stations, through Dublin’s Temple Bar, Geneva and Basel’s Christmas markets, literally dragging the trunk through the city streets of Prague at 4:00 a.m. (because the wheels on my hand truck had snapped) while trying to catch the train, and almost freezing to death, literally, in a Dusseldorf flat. Performing, and experiencing A Christmas Carol in foreign lands to people from all walks of life helped me trust the story itself and the language Dickens used to tell it, in ways I wouldn’t have, or couldn’t have, before.

“I found an authority with the text in the doing of it. I still feel like the story is incredibly important. That it needs to be shared, as simply and unadorned as possible, and my task is to meet people where they are when they come in the door, and get out of the way and let Dickens’ words do their work.”