'A Christmas Carol' gets a double take at Great Lakes Theater Festival and Actors' Summit

Great Lakes Theater Festival, the local franchisee of "A Christmas Carol" for lo these 22 years, has its patented picturesque and special-effects-laden production at PlayhouseSquare.
And, in an almost diametrically intimate and bring-your-imagination version, Actors' Summit in Akron is staging its first Scrooge-fest, but one with an even older local history.
Each is far from being, like Marley, as dead as a doornail. Despite the different approaches, and the parts of the 1843 story quoted, they both evoke Dickens' redemptive spirit.
"A Christmas Carol" has been adapted in multitudinous ways in almost every possible genre, sometimes to plum-pudding good effect (the 1962 "Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol") and sometimes coal-in-stocking bad (last year's Imax/Jim Carrey disaster).
The Great Lakes and Actors' Summit productions represent a chapter of Cleveland theater lore.
The version in Akron, by Doris Baizley, is one the Cleveland Play House staged for eight years, until 1987. Great Lakes pounced, and then-artistic director Gerald Freedman adapted his own "Carol," debuting in 1988.
The devices used to frame the story result in contrasting and paradoxical results. The literary device at Great Lakes yields a highly theatrical telling; the theatrical device at Actors' Summit reveals a highly literary one.
At Great Lakes
The Freedman version, staged this year by protege Victoria Bussert, opens, as it always has, with the Cleaveland family at home reading Dickens and its members morphing into the Dickens' characters.
Bussert adds a few nuances of humor this time around, but it's pretty much the familiar faces doing the familiar eye-popping, luxuriously costumed yet emotionally raw, honest and scary stuff.
The usual suspects in the 25-member cast (most notably the expansive Aled Davies as Scrooge, the impeccable Laura Perrotta as Mother Cleaveland and a spectral and electronically amplified Lynn Robert Berg as the clanking Ghost of Marley) turn their usual delightful turns.
The gracefully understated Bob Cratchit by Donald Carrier, familiar to Cleveland audiences from Canada's Stratford Shakespeare Festival and two recent appearances at the Cleveland Play House, is a welcome change-up. Here's hoping Carrier is becoming a regular local presence.
For those looking for a beautiful and grand experience, a Great Lakes ticket is a sure bet.
At Actors' Summit
The conceit of the Baizley adaptation in Akron concerns an itinerant theater company that is short a couple of players, forcing the crusty stage manager and the apprentice prop mistress to fill in as Scrooge and Tiny Tim.
Directed by the daughter-father team of Constance and Neil Thackaberry, it is more economical than the Great Lakes take, theatrically (Marley's chains are left deliberately to the imagination) chronographically (it's 90 minutes long) and spatially (the stage is tiny).
Once the story proper gets going, the show relies a lot on verbatim quotations of the Dickens text by the 11-member cast. Fortunately, this does not result in expositional drudgery but in an exquisitely intimate and spare retelling.
It also explores portions of the text not always seen in adaptations and packs some delightful surprises, including a two-headed, Tweedledum-Tweedledee Ghost of Christmas Present.
The action speeds along, goaded by Neil Thackaberry's imposing Scrooge. Other fine performances are turned in by Keith Stevens as an introspective Cratchit, Mark Seven as a diminutive Fezziwig and Lissy Gulick as his mirthful missus.
Either way, this is the best of "Carols" and the best of "Carols."