Amid the sugarplums and good cheer, dyspeptic holiday-themed diversions also abound this time of year. For the third year in a row, the Goodman Theatre gets into the anti-holiday show act with “Twist Your Dickens,” created by Chicago improv vets and former Emmy Award-winning writers for “The Colbert Report” Peter Gwinn and Bobby Mort. So with “A Christmas Carol” in the Albert and this show in the Owen, the big house on Dearborn essentially is a one-stop shop for those who want to the deck the halls, and those who want to deck the jolly.
I missed the first two outings of this show, but Gwinn and Mort reportedly reworked the script this year. And in place of Steppenwolf vet Francis Guinan, Scrooge is now played by Second City vet Ron West, who originated the role in Los Angeles in 2012. He’s supported by a top-notch ensemble whose performances tend to make us forget that Gwinn and Mort are taking a fairly kitchen-sink approach to holiday stories. I don’t mean in the gritty domestic drama sense, but in the “let’s take a bunch of familiar stuff and throw it onstage to see what sticks” sense.
So Joe Dempsey’s George Bailey runs through Scrooge’s counting house. We see the “lost” ending to “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” in which Dempsey’s Linus engages in a religious vs. secular debate on the meaning of the holiday with the rest of the cast, decked out in Rachel Lambert’s cardboard replicas of the Peanuts kids. And the misfit toys from “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” find new homes with Logan Square hipsters, proving the time-honored holiday wisdom that “there is always someone who will appreciate you ironically.”
There are also a few improv breaks. (Shoutout to Lauren, the audience member who gamely came up onstage twice to help out the pros.) A 1940s-style radio riff on “The 12 Days of Christmas” goes on too long (though Greg Matthew Anderson, who also plays Bob Cratchit, worked it to the hilt). By contrast, short snippets where Marley (Dempsey again) pulls apart a paper chain made from audience-penned “misdeeds” yields some gems.
The two biggest events of this fall — the Cubs World Series victory and the election of Donald Trump — both get shoutouts. Carisa Barreca’s inebriated Ghost of Christmas Present, decked out in a Cubs nightshirt, would have fit in well with the imbibers from “the Twelve Bars of Xmas” pub crawl who were stumbling home on the Red Line on Saturday, and Joel Boyd’s 1980s-inspired Ghost of Christmas Past showed us the origin story of another savior — Cubs first-baseman Anthony Rizzo.
As for the PEOTUS — well, at one point, the cast asked for suggestions of a “natural disaster.” His name came up, and they ran with it.
There’s a slapdash quality to the show that sometimes veers into the self-indulgent. But when it focuses on evergreen questions raised by the original, it’s particularly funny. Dempsey (who is, as you may have gathered by now, a standout throughout) plays Scrooge’s nephew Fred as a man on the verge of insanity. He has, after all, been doing the same thing every year — inviting his uncle to Christmas dinner — while expecting a different result. Of Sarah Dell’Amico’s presumably doomed Tiny Tim, West’s Scrooge observes “I never knew weak legs could be fatal.”
So the mix of sketch revue and satirical sendup of the original story doesn’t always gel. But ultimately, “Twist Your Dickens” feels like a sometimes-woozy but satisfying holiday office party with your favorite cynical wisecracking fellow wage slaves. You know how it’s going to end up, but there are some nice surprises in the Secret Santa grab bag along the way.
Kerry Reid is a freelance critic.
Review: “Twist Your Dickens” (3 STARS)
When: Through Dec. 30
Where: Goodman Owen Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St.
Running time: 2 hours
Tickets: $25-$47 at 312-443-3800 or goodmantheatre.org
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