Going back to 1908, there have been at least 25 movies plus innumerable stage versions of A Christmas Carol, starring a diverse bunch of actors portraying the curmudgeonly Ebenezer Scrooge, including John Carradine, George C. Scott, Bill Murray, Cicely Tyson -- even an animated Mr. Magoo production featuring Jim Backus’ voice. In October, cinema spoofer David Zucker’s (Airplane, Naked Gun) An American Carol used the tried and true ghosts of things past routine in his rather unfunny attempt to mock documentarian Michael Moore. (As Tim Robbins told me about Hollywood conservatives: “They have no talent.”) In any case, there’s never been a Christmas Carol interpretation quite like the Actors’ Gang’s Aah! Scrooge Must Die, written and directed by Angelina Berliner. 

With sincere apologies to Charles Dickens, the Actors’ Gang’s adaptation of his A Christmas Carol is most definitely not for the kiddies. The scene is set as audience members entering the theater lobby are greeted by a drunken, foulmouthed Santa (Gang vet Steven Porter, who also plays Gaffer Scrooge) and bawdy elf. Onstage this adult version opens with Scrooge’s (Scott Harris) pants down, and in terms of decorum, it is – so to speak – downhill from there. The play goes on to feature orgies (although, alas, fully clothed), numerous homosexual references, incest, prostitution, atheism, murder and more mayhem, as Dickens meets Sweeney Todd and Bertolt Brecht’s and Kurt Weill’s Mack the Knife from The Threepenny Opera (another tales of Dickensian London).

Given the leftist tilt and windmill tilting of the Gang and Robbins (the troupe’s Artistic Director), the conflict between the stingy Scrooge – the quintessential capitalist pig -- and his oppressed underlings, Marley (Justin Zsebe) and Bob Cratchit (Chris Schultz), becomes a class struggle Christmas carol in Berliner’s reinterpretation. But in the end, the proletarian theater gives way to the Christian medieval mystery play genre, resolving the comedy-drama with the same old nostalgic pangs of conscience of Dickens’ morality tale (published five years before Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’ 1848 The Communist Manifesto). As one character notes: “He’s got one of those things that pumps blood.” “You mean a heart?” drolly asks another one of the dramatis personae. After all, with its theme of redemption, Ahh! Scrooge Must Die celebrates Christmas – not May Day.

In any case, Berliner wittily takes aim at contemporary humbugs, and was quoted as saying: “Some of the people we see in our political and pop culture are just mean and take so much pleasure in it. People like Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh can be nasty, selfish and misanthropic. They’re the real Scrooges of today.” True to form, Harris plays Scrooge as if he is indeed a madman.

Scenic and Lighting Designer Francois-Pierre Couture’s moody, hazy lighting enhances the show and theme. The main problem with Aah! Scrooge Must Die is that the Gang’s Ivy Substation, with its 99-seater Culver City venue, is too small a space for such a raw, raucous, rollicking production and its ensemble of 16 lusty, zesty thespians walking the overcrowded boards. This play is too loud for such a confined area, which adds to its over-the-top quality.

In this day and age of “Prop Hate” and mass protests against Proposition 8, gays may object to the homosexuality that seems to smack of “boogery” and “perversion.” Atheists may be displeased at being lumped in the same category as Scrooge (before he sees the light) in this production that has something in it to offend almost the entire audience. Or, as Tiny Tim (the handicapped lad is actually winsomely played by a female, Elora Dannon) puts it: “God bless us, everyone.”

As for me, with Barack Obama’s hawkish cabinet picks and his promised surge of Yankee troops at Afghanistan, I’m looking forward to the Actors’ Gang’s next presentation: the antiwar classic The Trial of the Catonsville 9, which opens with a Gala Benefit Performance Feb. 6. Now that promises to be a work of conscience and consciousness that will have audiences saying “Bah humbug!”  and “thou shalt not kill”  to the military-industrial complex.

Aah! Scrooge Must Die is playing through Jan. 10 at 8:00 p.m. on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays; and at 10:30 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays at The Ivy Substation, 9070 Venice Blvd., Culver City, 90232. (Note: The theatre is dark Dec. 21-Jan. 2.) For more information: (310)838-GANG; www.theactorsgang.com.   The Actors' Gang at The Ivy Substation
9070 Venice Blvd.  |  Culver City, CA 90232
310-838-