South Coast Repertory Announces New Production of ‘A Christmas Carol’
- Paul Hodgins
- 1 hour ago
- 6 min read
Pulitzer-nominated playwright Amy Freed, an SCR favorite, will write the adaptation, debuting in 2028.
The 2025-26 season has been a year of redemption and restoration for South Coast Repertory. Like many arts institutions, Orange County’s premier regional theater was hobbled by the pandemic and took several seasons to recover, and the process has been fraught with challenges. While it hasn’t returned to its pre-COVID level of robust health, there are signs that this season is indeed a turnaround for SCR.
In the fall, “Million Dollar Quartet” drew the healthiest audience for any production in years. Later this season, SCR will show two plays in repertory, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “God of Carnage,” an ambitious move that requires additional resources and taxes actors and backstage talent alike. Earlier this week, SCR unveiled a well-funded permanent collaboration with the University of California, Irvine that will train theater majors from the Claire Trevor School of the Arts and offer a theatrical experience for about 500 UCI students every semester.
And yesterday, South Coast Rep announced a hugely anticipated production, a plan that was years in the making and delayed by COVID and other setbacks: a new version of “A Christmas Carol.” It will be written by playwright Amy Freed, a longtime SCR favorite. In remarks last night before the first performance of its cherished annual production of “A Christmas Carol,” the theater company’s artistic director, David Ivers, said Freed’s version will debut in 2028. It will replace Jerry Patch’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’ iconic Yuletide ghost story, which has been produced by the theater since 1980.
SCR’s version of “A Christmas Carol” has become one of Orange County’s venerable holiday traditions. For many families, attending the heartwarming Christmas show is a longstanding multi-generational tradition. The mere thought of tinkering with such success might seem foolish to some. But Ivers is confident that audiences are ready to welcome and embrace a new approach.
“This amazing production that we’ve been doing for 45 years – audiences love it, we love it, but I felt when I first got here that it was time to be thinking of the next iteration,” Ivers said.
Patch’s script has served the theater company well and gifted a cherished role to one of its founding artists, Hal Landon Jr., for 40 consecutive seasons. When he finally retired from the portrayal in 2019, Landon had set a record as the longest-running Scrooge in professional American theater.
Ivers knew it could be risky to imperil that kind of success by challenging multigenerational memories of Patch’s “Christmas Carol.” “How would I avoid hate mail for being the person to do that?” he joked.
But Ivers said there was general agreement among everyone involved in the production that it was time to think about a new approach. Unfortunately, the pandemic upended their plans.
“We were working on it and then the dreaded COVID put the brakes on it,” Ivers said. But he decided that slow-walking the project wasn’t such a bad idea. “I thought it would have been really irresponsible immediately post-COVID to make the swap.” In retrospect, the delay was probably a blessing in disguise, Ivers said, giving post-COVID audiences and SCR employees that chance to settle back into established routines. “This (current) production became a real salve and a balm for us. We feel like now is exactly the right time to be announcing the change.”
Ivers’ first big decision was choosing a playwright to undertake the project. He envisioned a version that hewed close to Dickens’ story but offered new insights and ideas. His first choice was Freed. The Pulitzer-nominated playwright has enjoyed a long and fruitful association with SCR, and several of her plays have received world premieres there over the last three decades: “Freedomland” (1997), “The Beard of Avon” (2001), “Safe in Hell” (2004), “You, Nero” (2009) “The Monster Builder” (2017) and “Shrew!” (2018). In pre-show remarks, Freed credited SCR with helping to launch her career as a playwright.
“Amy is a playwright who is part of our legacy,” Ivers said. “She was on my list and Suzanne's too (Suzanne Appel is SCR’s managing director). She was always my first choice.”
Although Freed hasn’t started writing a script yet, she made a preliminary request that Ivers would direct the first production. He agreed. “I’m really looking forward to it. I can really pay attention and be aware of things that are important to our audiences.”
In her work, Freed sometimes whimsically reimagines history and takes bold and surprising approaches with familiar stories. But Ivers said that her version of Dickens’ work would respect the source and not deviate from it in radical ways. “We don’t want a ‘Christmas Carol’ that’s set on the range. We want to see a production that honors traditions and has a grand scale and spectacle. I think Amy is perfect for this.”
Scrooge is ‘like a crustacean’
In a post-show interview on Friday, Freed said her first role as a playwright tackling ‘A Christmas Carol’ is to respect the source. “It's Dickens, and piece that’s been so resonant for, you know, almost 200 years. These texts become so solidly imprinted on us that you want to, first of all, not create pain.”
Freed recently acquired a copy of Dickens’ prompt book for “A Christmas Carol” from the New York Public Library. He frequently read "A Christmas Carol" in public; in fact, his readings of his works, especially this novella, became a significant second career for him. Dickens performed a condensed, hour-and-a-half version of the story more than 100 times, memorizing the text and using different voices for each character.
“It's fascinating,” Freed said. “ And it's incredible. because it’s like looking at a script of mine. It’s full of notes and big hack marks. So it isolates what he saw as theatrical action in a sense. I was rather fascinated (by) all the possibilities. I was looking at the stuff that was cut and (wondering) why it was cut. The commentary and … the observations and the meanders are informative for me, if not something that might make their way into production.”
Pages from Charles Dickens’ personal prompt copy of ‘A Christmas Carol.’ In notation from the New York Public Library, it is the “only prompt copy Dickens used during his 16 years of publicly reading ‘A Christmas Carol.’” Images courtesy of the New York Public Library
Freed anticipates that she will explore the reasons for Scrooge’s misanthropy. “There's something about the hardness of the man. He's like a crustacean, and he's hiding his trauma under a tough shell. That’s something quite radical in the spiritual proposition of the play. If that doesn't come through, I think there’s something quite missed. So how to personalize the dilemma of the heart?”
Freed’s affection for Dickens is rooted in the timeless universality of his themes and his deep humanity.
“I love Dickens. Next to Shakespeare, he's the writer that embodies the drive and the scope of a great artist. I’m fascinated with his trauma and how it fed into his work. And (Victorian England) was dealing with what we're dealing with. For them, it was the Industrial Revolution, and the fallout from that. They saw the material monster coming that was (challenging) the humanity of an older world. So I think their era and ours are conjoined that way.”
For South Coast Repertory and many other theaters, “A Christmas Carol” is a reliable income generator. Like the ballet world’s “Nutcracker,” it brings families to the theater who otherwise seldom interact with the performing arts. But Freed said it would be a mistake to simply create a flashy crowd-pleaser.
“I think that would be the death of the piece, honestly, the death of an enjoyable ‘Christmas Carol.’” Freed thinks the best performances of Scrooge’s transformative journey haunted her and stayed with her. “The versions I grew up with, and the (actors) I’ve seen in the role – those men were just revelatory and sophisticated and beautiful. And Scrooge’s journey touches you whether you’ve had any exposure to Dickens.”
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