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Ojai- Gerald Charles Dickens is having the best of times. Crisscrossing the United States for the last three holiday seasons, the 34-year-old actor reads from "A Christmas Carol" at posh hotels, libraries and Victorian festivals-much as his great-great-grandfather Charles Dickens once read to worshipful audiences on both sides of the Atlantic.
The actor performed the past two nights at the Ojai Valley Inn and will appear at The Regal Biltmore in Los Angeles on Saturday.
In a "Tea With Scrooge" here Wednesday, the lanky, bearded Dickens strode before a crowd of 150 in a blue frock coat, canary-yellow vest and gold-patterned ascot. He did a cowering Bob Cratchit and a trilling Tiny Tim. He have flesh to the ghosts of Christ past, present and future. Most of all, he produced a mean Scroogian snarl:
"Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What's Christmastime to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer. . .If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with "Merry Christmas' on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart!"
Not a soul in his audience agreed. There was no scowling into the teacups or muttering of "Bah, humbug!" into the finger sandwiches.
"I thought it was wonderful," said Kathy Hannifan of Westlake Village after the 90-minutes solo show. "It's my favorite spirit-provoking performance."
The audience was as rapt as it was in Charles Dickens' day, although the author had been less than thrilled with his American encounters. He railed against the national habit of spitting. "In every barroom and hotel passage, the stone floor looks as if it were paved with open oysters," Dickens observed with disgust.....
Fast forward 155 years: Gerald Dickens is downright pleased with his lot in the States, even a bit surprised that people are paying such attention. After all, he is just another famous name in a land that is loaded with them.
"The first time I came across to the U.S., it was very cold in England, the phone bill needed paying, the car needed fixing," he said in a recitation of Dickensian woes. "But on this side of the Atlantic, everyone wanted my signature, they wanted to meet me, to take me to dinner." Growing up a Dickens was nothing terribly special. "He was an historic figure I happened to be related to, Dickens said."
...."A Christmas Carol" has become as much a part of the season as traipsing through the mall. When Charles Dickens died in 1870, a little girl is said to have asked: "Does this mean Father Christmas is dead as well?" The slim volume which hasn't been out of print since Dickens published it in 1843, has been the source of countless school plays, the centerpiece of Christmas pageants and the germ of innumerable spoofs-but mainly-but mainly in the United States.
....As Gerald Dickens grew up, an uncle would gather the family for readings from "A Christmas Carol" every Christmas Eve. But the Dickens phenomenon never meant much to Gerald until he was asked to read it at |
