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Leslie Bramm has been working like a dog. He also happened to be covered with dogs. He answered his door to let in a guest, but he quickly hobbled to the couch in his dimly lit living room, explaining that he had a tree-cutting accident that injured his leg. He had to prop up the leg on pillows, and he was under the doctor’s strict orders to keep still.
All told, Bramm was a dog’s dream come true. Or three dogs, as the case was last month at his Washington Heights apartment in Manhattan, where his household pets were keeping him company as he recovered from the accident. The two cats, of course, couldn’t be bothered to join the group cuddle. One jumped up onto a counter and ate; the other perched dismissively on a couch, glancing occasionally at a lava lamp on the floor.
Bramm, who is a playwright, had hoped to be in Maine by now to see the premiere of his new adaptation of “A Christmas Carol,” which Penobscot Theatre Company opens tonight at the Bangor Opera House. But the leg, which was shattered when a heavy log pinned him down while doing yardwork at his country home, has kept him on the couch with the dogs.
Nevertheless, Bramm and Penobscot Theatre Company director Scott Levy have been e-jostling the script for “A Christmas Carol” between New York City and Bangor for a month, making last-minute changes, tweaking scenes, adjusting lines. The two have worked together on several other theatrical projects. They also have played music together – Bramm on guitar, Levy on sax.
When Levy stepped into the position of artistic director at PTC earlier this year, he wanted to retain the season’s popular holiday show, but he also wanted to put his own signature on it. He kept the Dickens story. He kept actor Ken Stack as Ebenezer Scrooge. And he added Bramm, who added, of all things, the Beatles.
The Beatles?
“The more I read Dickens, the more I wanted to stay in the context of his language,” said Bramm. “So I kept his words, but I also wanted to phase out Charles’ voice and put in mine. I remembered an interview with John Lennon during the ’60s. Someone compared him to Gilbert and Sullivan, and he said he always fancied himself more like Dickens. Then I started seeing how cheeky Dickens’ dialogue is. It can be dry, but if you read it with a cockney accent, it’s funny.”
Bramm added a fab-four chorus – of sorts – to the Victorian tale. The bickering foursome takes the place of the narrator usually present in most stage adaptations of the story. The four actors come and go, moving the story along, creating their own conflicts and resolving them.
“We wanted to modernize the story while trying to create characters with more humor,” said Levy. “We also wanted to engage the children in the audience more.”
Levy himself will join the festivities by DJing in a Santa suit at most performances. If you can have a Jewish Santa Claus, he said, why not the Beatles in “Christmas Carol”?
“They’re British, so they fit in,” said Levy with a chuckle. “The Beatles wielded their heads in Leslie’s thoughts, and that was it. Hey, Scrooge was a pop-culture icon from the 19th century. The Beatles are a pop icon from the 20th. We wanted to meld the two together. And it’s always fun to work on a script with Leslie. He writes dialogue as if he’s listening to a scene as a piece of music. The play is made up of scenes that are like songs on an album.”
If he had to pick an album, which would it be? “Yellow Submarine”? “Abbey Road”? “Magical Mystery Tour”?
“‘Hard Day’s Night,'” said Levy.
While there is no Beatles music in the show – it features more traditional tunes such as “Silver Bells” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” – it is split into “staves” or stanzas based on the original story. The ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future are still there. So are Scrooge’s childhood friends, his family and, of course, the Cratchits.
It’s just that now there is a quartet of Liverpudlian commentators.
“Kids will find them funny,” assured Bramm. “But you don’t need to know about the Beatles to appreciate them.”
And the story’s lesson of living in the moment and caring for others is very much intact.
“The text has been around for 150 years,” said Bramm, while the sleeping dogs shifted around his arm gestures. “I don’t think there’s anything I can do that would be unique. I can only tell the story the way I felt it, the way it was meaningful to me as I read it. The other night, I told my wife, ‘Scrooge only changes because of self-interest.’ He did what he did because he felt his ass was on the line. My wife promptly reminded me, ‘Isn’t that why people change?'”
Ken Stack, better known during this time of year as Ebenezer Scrooge, put it another way.
“No one is more of a traditionalist about ‘A Christmas Carol’ than Ken Stack,” said Stack, who has been involved in seven adaptations of “A Christmas Carol” over the last 24 years. “And I have had a delight of a time working on this show.”
Bramm won’t see the staging of his script until the end of the run because he has to stay couchbound for a while longer. But he plans to travel to Bangor for the last two performances of Beatlemania meets Dickensian classic.
Penobscot Theatre Company will present “A Christmas Carol” through Dec. 23 at the Bangor Opera House, 131 Main St., Bangor. For tickets call 942-3333 or visit www.PenobscotTheatre.org.
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