What a sorry mess of a retelling of Dickens' holiday classic this is. The only thing Kelsey Grammar was missing was the apple stuffed in his mouth, as this would have completed the picture of the perfect Christmas ham. The dreary cardboard sets evoked something more like the Carpathian villages of grade-B vampire flicks than Dickensian London, and never was I convinced that the outdoor temperature was less than 80 degrees. Add to this the tiresome Menken score (EVERYTHING that this man writes sounds exactly like the last thing he wrote), the most grating and talentless passel of child actors ever to have been paraded before a camera, the phoniest English accents imaginable (it's either highfalutin Oxbridge or exaggerated Cockney, with no gradations in between), a laughable script, and...oh well, to catalog everything that was wrong with this woefully misguided attempt at holiday "entertainment" would run on ad nauseam. And nausea (from too much treacle, probably) was the inevitable result of enduring this fiasco.
Review of A Christmas Carol: The Musical
