A Niagara Christmas Carol At The Foster Festival
It’s become quite the thing for regional theatre companies to create bespoke variations of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” The Foster Festival’s entry in the growing list, A Niagara Christmas Carol moves the action to the Niagara region during the construction of the Welland Canal in 1840, about the time Dickens penned “A Christmas Carol” (it was first published in 1843).
The good news is that it’s a winner.
Festival Artistic Associate Jamie Williams has crafted a clever adaptation that allows a sprawling story to be told by just five actors, all of them save Scrooge playing many roles.
The Welland Canal, the dream project of local visionary William Hamilton Merritt (Darren Keay), is in dire straits as A Niagara Christmas Carol opens. Engineering challenges and, arguably, financial mismanagement have left it on the brink of insolvency.
Hundreds of impoverished Irish workmen have been laid off and their families are on the brink of starvation.
As fate would have it, Ebenezer Scrooge (Williams doing double duty), the surviving partner of Scrooge and Marley, Accountants and Loans, holds a fistful of Canal debt which he refuses to convert into shares. The game is afoot.
Victorian London and the Niagara region of the 1840s are not precisely mirror images of each other and so Williams has made some compromises. Most noticeable to those familiar with Dickens’ tale (and who isn’t?) is the absence of the Cratchits.
Their place is taken by the family of Bob Gallagher (Keay again) and his long-suffering wife (the always reliable Claire Jullien), shivering in the Irish shanty town of Slabtown. And, yes, they have a sickly child named Tim.
Williams has inserted fascinating bits of history that were new to me and, I dare say, many Canadians. At the time, the so-called Coloured Corps, composed of free Blacks and former slaves from the United States, was stationed along the Welland Canal project. Their duties, at least in part, seem to have been to keep the shanty Irish in line.
We meet, briefly, Private Lewis Tolliver (Francis Masaba, a tyro actor in one of his first professional roles) who forges a sympathetic relationship with the Gallaghers.
Despite these and other insertions and emendations, A Niagara Christmas Carol hews very closely to Dickens’ template, especially when Scrooge returns to his austere digs for the long night of the soul that forms the heart of A Niagara Christmas Carol.
Call me a sentimental old fool, but this material, which by now could have congealed into a solid block of treacle, can, in the hands of a capable cast and director, still bring a tear to even the most jaded eye. And so it is here.
Director Emily Oriold is working with a terrific company, especially Keay and Jullien. Keay is possessed of a commanding voice and a surfeit of energy. Jullien brings numerous shades of grey to the supporting characters she is called on to play and then has a gleefully good time as the corpse-stripping shrew selling Scrooge’s effects. Rounding out the company is the very able Emily Lukasik.
Williams is an exemplary Scrooge, who I suspect will age beautifully into the part. Not incidentally, he is becoming a very good playwright. A Niagara Christmas Carol is very different from his knockabout Western farce Pinkerton Comes to Prospect and every bit as accomplished.
Director Oriold keeps the action humming on the ingenious set by Beckie Morris. Four two-sided set pieces of varying shapes and sizes are wheeled effortlessly by the cast across a floor depicting a map of the Welland Canal area as it was in 1840. Overhead hangs a framed screen which fills with period etchings and even one of Scrooge’s ghosts.
Costumes by Alex Amini and lighting by Alex Sykes do a wonderful job of setting the scene as well.
The Foster Festival plans to revive this production bi-annually. It looks like an enduring Niagara area tradition has arrived.
Footnote: The Festival has provided a fascinating backgrounder co-authored by Williams and Adrian Petry, public historian at the St. Catharines Museum and Welland Canals Centre, that annotates the many historical references in the script. It’s well worth a perusal.
A Niagara Christmas Carol continues at Ridley College’s Mandeville Theatre through December 14, 2025. For more information and to purchase tickets visit the Foster Festival website.
[image: Foster Festival]
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