A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Carol
Adapted and Directed by Rob Melrose
From the Novella by Charles Dickens

The creative team:
Choreographer: Christopher Windom
Scenic Designer: Michael Locher
Costume Designer: Raquel Barreto
Lighting Designer: Cat Tate Starmer
Sound Designer: Cliff Caruthers
Illusion Designer: Jim Steinmeyer
Puppet Designer: Afsaneh Aayani
Music Director: John L. Cornelius II
Fight Director & Intimacy Specialist Adam Noble, Dialect Coach Jim Johnson, Stage Manager Rebecca R.D. Hamlin, and Assistant Stage Manager Emily Bohannan.

It is not often that a designer receives an invitation to design a new production of A Christmas Carol at a regional theater in the US: producing that show is a major endeavor that rolls around every ten years or so, with the expectation that the initial investment will have guaranteed return and draw in audiences over years to come. I had mixed feelings about the invitation: while I consider the Alley an artistic home and my collaborations with director Rob Melrose go back over two decades to the foundation of Cutting Ball Theater in San Francisco, the tradition of attending a holiday presentation of Carol was not a part of my culture or upbringing.
The show was initially designed before theaters had reopened from the Covid pandemic and came to be an exercise of faith in the moment when we would be able to gather again. In speaking with friends and collaborators, I realized how important the ritual of attending a performance of A Christmas Carol had been in their lives. Everyone had a story and an emotional memory. This gave me permission to tap into my own memories of how holidays were celebrated in my childhood: colorful nativity scenes, chanting processions carrying wooden saints, red and blue “pastoril” dances, afro-Brazilian drumming circles that filled the Summer nights all the way to Carnaval… the holidays also brought about a heightened awareness of deep social inequalities, as well as sense of isolation I often experience as an immigrant. I embraced the contradictions and looked closely at this adaptation, reading it as completely new story and finding joy in the humor and the magic.
The process of putting the show through the costume shop was a major learning experience for me. I was involved in the selection of every yard of fabric and every button, swimming into tubs of swatch rings from New York and spending days in downtown Los Angeles at every school break. I quickly learned to let go of any instinct to be precious: the sketches for Carol are deeply “imperfect”, some of them the third (or fourth or tenth) iteration of a design in response to casting changes or fabric availability. I happily dug through existing fabric and trim stocks at the theater and adjusted my designs whenever there was a chance use something that was in-house, to re-purpose and re-imagine. I relied heavily on collaborators who knew the original story much better than I did, but also made sure my designs were not in reverence to an old, dusty story, but rather bringing to life a new script and creating a new tradition for families and communities in the Houston area.