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Jacob Marley was dead, to begin with... "Soon, of course, Marley will reappear, and Ebenezer Scrooge will snarl, "Bah, humbug!" and Tiny Tim will ask God to bless us, every one. And the actor who plays all 26 characters in one road-show version of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol will wind up exhausted, hoarse-and elated.
"I never tire of it," he says. "This is the traditional way-the Dickens way." And who would know better than Gerald Dickens, the novelist's great-great-grandson, who is on a 48-day, 27-city sweep of the U.S., his fourth in four years. Playing theaters, libraries and private clubs, Dickens, 36 follows in the footsteps of his ancestor, who read his works here in 1867 and 1868. "His readings were always sold out," says Gerald. "He was like a rock star." |
The son of medical-book publishers Betty and David Dickens, Gerald read Oliver Twist at 13, and, he ways, "It put me off Dickens." At 30, though, working as an actor, he rediscovered his ancestor after a charity asked him to give a reading of A Christmas Carol. That led him to write a one-man show and to his first U.S. tour. "A Christmas Carol is much bigger here than in England," he says. "Here it's a symbol of Christmas."
After his last performance, Dec. 23 in St. Paul, Dickens will fly home on Christmas Eve to England, where he lives in the village of Burwash, south of London, with his wife, Lucy, 31, and their three children. There will be, he says, "lots of holding and hugging and getting back together." Tiny Tim would approve. |
