There is a subsection of American culture who loves Hallmark Christmas movies. I mean, loves. The romance, the schmaltz, the familiar formula — it’s Yuletide comfort food for the soul.
If you’re one of these people, have I got a musical for you! With a template provided by Charles Dickens, you already know where you’re going with Estella Scrooge: A Christmas Carol with a Twist. Familiarity—check. Schmaltz? Trust me. As for romance, by grafting a bit of Great Expectations onto this Christmas Carol redux, you should feel enough warm fuzzies to get you through at least one cold, COVIDy winter’s night.
The eponymous Estella (Betsy Wolfe), great-great-great-great-great-great granddaughter of Ebenezer (Danny Burstein), is CEO of Bleak House Capital and wears the label “gentrifying capitalist” with pride. She’s so devoted to the voodoo of trickle-down economics that she sings a whole song about it. On December 23, righthand woman Betty Cratchit (Megan McGinnis) alerts her to a new foreclosure back in Estella’s hometown of Pickwick, Ohio. Curiosity piqued by the fact that the property — Harthouse, a hotel for the down-and-out that never turns away anyone for lack of funds — is run by Estella’s childhood flame Philip “Pip” Nickleby (Clifton Duncan), who she Havishammed all those years ago, nothing will do but to hop on the first plane out in the morning. It’s not like she had Xmas plans, anyway.
According to the press release, Estella Scrooge is “the first digital theatre piece filmed entirely during the pandemic, utilizing cutting-edge technology.” And as a set of still photos over the closing credits documents, the entire film was shot one performance at a time — as in, no two actors were ever together on-set — and cobbled together with green-screen and digital tech that looks like a helluva lotta work.
The result is what you might expect if Grand Theft Auto characters decided to take in a musical whose cast wasn’t CGI. It’s simultaneously impressive and awkward, and the more ambitious the design team get with the digital effects, the more their limitations show, especially since most people alive today don’t know a world without Industrial Light & Magic.
But you’re not coming to Estella Scrooge for verisimilitude, so this isn’t a fatal flaw. In fact, the weirdness is strangely engaging. A more serious shortcoming is one inherent to producing a musical in this manner: the inability of the cast to truly interact. This manifests in two ways. The first is the simple lack of physical/eye contact. The technical team has patched things together reasonably well and for the most part get away with it even when you can’t help but notice. But during the duets we really feel it, particularly the big love song between Estella and Philip. I would love to see Wolfe and Duncan perform this onstage together, because their connection is convincing; but because they aren’t together, their intimacy cannot be fully realized.
The biggest problem, though, has to do with why it’s so much easier to make musicals works onstage than on screen: the spectacle. The thrill of the musical stage isn’t just the songs and lead performances — it’s the totality that shoots you over the moon. When a big number is done right, you almost don’t know where to look for all the movement and action/reaction. But with social distancing tying his hands, co-writer/director John Caird — who’s got a couple of Tonys on his mantle, so it ain’t like he doesn’t know how to do theatre — has opted to cut to single shots for reactions, which is downright clunky. The only serious attempt at an ensemble spectacle is the scene-setting opener, which is so-so as a musical number but does effectively ground us in the film’s universe. Otherwise, Caird and co-writer/composer Paul Gordon have hewed mostly to solo numbers and duets — and when they do go ensemble, they pretty much eschew spectacle, which is probably the right choice.
Musically, look, no-one’s gonna confuse Estella Scrooge with Sweeney Todd — it doesn’t help that are few analog instruments to be found — but Gordon is fluent in the vernacular of musical theatre, and even an overreliance on familiar tropes and less-than-literary lyrics does not prevent him from tickling your funny bone or vibrating your heartstrings now and again. The entire cast sings well enough for the material, even if occasionally it at least feels like there’s a hint of Auto-Tune in the mix.
The best thing about Estella Scrooge may be its self-awareness. The Hallmarky formalism, the schmaltz, the pat performances, the heavy-handed references to other Dickens works — these aren’t weaknesses but strengths, all perfectly in keeping with the overall attempt. Caird & Gordon know exactly what kind of entertainment they’re creating, and that knowledge is key to its relative success.
This self-awareness is nowhere more apparent than inside Harthouse, which is run by “almost a family, a strange little family” of non-blood relations (there’s a song about that, too) that knowingly waves its banner of inclusivity — multiracial, multigenerational, multisexual — in your face. “Whatever we are, we’re not quite the norm […] Unconventional, that we admit / We do things our own way.” Transboy Smike (Em Grosland) most clearly points this up. “I’m Smike,” he chirps to Estella by way of introduction, pointing to a pronoun pin on his jacket: “He/him/his, or they/them/theirs.” It’s one of several laugh-out-loud moments in a script that’s not afraid to poke fun at both itself and the times we live in. “I told you that mortgage was a bad idea,” Nickleby’s attorney, Mr. Jaggers (Kevyn Morrow), laments. “Interest-only reversed-adjustable sub-prime loan — nobody knows what that means!”
Despite the cast’s inability to occupy a common physical space, the performances work well enough, acted in true Hallmarkian style. Among the minor characters, Patrick Page stands out as the Ghost of Christmas Future, particularly for his dancing.
“Life isn’t fair, I know that much. But it never was,” says Estella near the end of her spectral travels. “We can make it fairer, if we choose,” rejoins the ghost, culminating the 21st-century spin Caird & Gordon have given A Christmas Carol’s social message. A great critic of capitalism, Dickens himself would surely approve.
But beyond their modest success on that score, the entire Estella Scrooge team have done yeoman’s work to inject our COVID Christmastime with the combined comfort of musical theatre and the delightfully sappy seasonal fare so many of us love. Don’t be surprised if one of these years you find Estella Scrooge running on the Hallmark Channel. But in 2020, you have to go get it.
Streaming Musicals’ Estella Scrooge: A Christmas Carol with a Twist streams on-demand through January 31. Cost: $22.99–$44.99. For more information or to purchase a “ticket” so that 30% of the proceeds benefit Musical Theatre West, go to musical.org/estella.