Review: Blue Barn play lets you contrast 'Marleys'

You could spend an immensely enjoyable evening cataloging the contrasts between “Jacob Marley's Christmas Carol,” which opened Friday at the Blue Barn Theatre, and “A Christmas Carol,” the longtime holiday mainstay at the Omaha Community Playhouse.

The playhouse version of the classic Dickens tale is sumptuously detailed with Victorian costumes, colorful scenery, falling snow, beautiful singing, scores of actors.

The Blue Barn version is performed in a black void, with minimal props, no costume changes, four actors playing all the parts. But it's sumptuously detailed, too. The only difference is that audience imagination supplies all the details, with the help of exceptional staging, lighting and acting.

And if you've seen the playhouse version, it's impossible to watch this one without visions of the other dancing in your head.

“Marley's” director Kevin Lawler and Nils Haaland, who plays the title character, know the playhouse production well, as former Scrooges in the road version of the show, but they have copied nothing from it. Well, maybe nothing except taking the material seriously and bringing its message of humanity alive for an audience.

In “Jacob Marley's Christmas Carol,” playwright Tom Mula reimagines the story from Marley's viewpoint, beginning just after Marley has died and entered the afterlife. Quickly, he is overcome with the weight of those famous chains he forged in life. An irascible celestial clerk (Scott Working) checks Marley's life ledger and, peering over glasses perched at the end of his nose, tells him he has just one chance to balance the books and shed the chains. He must bring about a complete change of heart in his old partner Scrooge (Doug Blackburn), and he must do it in 24 hours.

“Impossible,” Marley wails. Worse, he's assigned a sassy, spritely helper named Bogle (Alan Brincks) who irritates him no end.

But off they set on their journey, taking us with them every step of the way — to the top of the St. Paul Cathedral dome in London, to the outer reaches of space where tortured souls drift and moan, to the distant past of Marley and Scrooge's beginnings, and to the recent past of Marley's shocking and unexpected death.

I kept thinking of Errol Flynn as I watched Brincks bound about the stage like a bearded pirate in a truly memorable performance. Working seems almost to change shape and appearance, so good is he at morphing into different characters. Blackburn makes a crusty, and then surprisingly vulnerable, Scrooge.

Haaland is phenomenal. He not only embodies Marley (“He looked as if somebody had squeezed all the juice out of him”) and a carefully calibrated arc of change within that character. He also sheds that skin to play the contrasting ghosts of Christmas past and present.

A recorded soundtrack written specifically for this show does a great job of underscoring and evoking emotional peaks and valleys, while Bill Van Deest's lighting effects go a long way in nudging our imaginations.

This is great, great storytelling done by some of Omaha's most gifted theater artists. If you asked me to pick between this and the Playhouse version, I can only say each is superior at what it is trying to be, and at evoking real Christmas spirit in all who see it.

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