A Christmas Carol:
A Live Radio Play
adapted from Charles Dickens
by Jim Sorensen
director’s notes by Jim Sorensen
There are stories you return to because you should, and stories you return to because you can’t help it. A Christmas Carol is both for me. I’ve lived with this tale for most of my creative life – eight separate productions, five different scripts, as an actor, a director, a producer. And that’s not even counting the various versions I grew up watching, with Alastair Sim, George C. Scott or Sir Michael Caine and the Muppets. Or Sir Patrick Stewart, Jim Carrey, or Scrooge McDuck. Point is, I love this story in the way you love something that has shaped you. It’s a companion, a touchstone, and a yearly reminder of what storytelling can do at its best.
But more than simple familiarity, it’s the moral gravity of the piece that gets me. Dickens doesn’t write a holiday card; he writes a call to empathy. Fred puts it plainly when he tells his uncle that Christmas is “a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time, when men and women seem to open their shut-up hearts freely and to think of others as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave.” That line has followed me for years, and names the thing that Carol does so well: it insists that our lives are braided together, and that we are responsible to one another. Not because it’s sentimental. Because it’s true. And thinking about it more deeply at this moment, I realize Mr. Dickens may have had much more influence on me than I ever even knew.
And humor. A Christmas Carol is full of laugh-out-loud snark and simple yet undeniable observations on the human spirit and experience. None of us live in 19th century London anymore, but Dickens’ insights into people and their motivations still ring as true as they did nearly 200 years ago, still allow us to laugh at ourselves and the cautionary tales of a world that has changed both dramatically and not at all. That’s another reason I love the story.
So with literally thousands of versions of A Christmas Carol to choose from, why this version? Why now? You can’t beat the story itself. But also, after Chris Marshall turned me on to the Campbell Playhouse version with Lionel Barrymore as the villain-turned-hero, and after the fun with last year’s It’s A Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play, and after spending a decade playing with my friends at the Radio Theatre Project at The Studio@620 in St. Petersburg and seeing audiences fall in love with this form of storytelling, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to do a radio theatre Carol.
I can’t wait for you to experience this story; the heart and the silliness. And the foley. The wonderfully theatrical art of making a sound – frequently using something entirely different to make that sound – that suggests a whole universe. A footstep in snow, a horse’s clop, a dissonant squeal that disturbs and portends. In this production we get to hear what Dickens describes – Bob Cratchit sliding down Cornhill twenty times in honor of Christmas Eve – and to make that joyful mischief live in the room. Foley doesn’t just illustrate; it invites the audience to play. To listen in stereo, both to the story and to the creation of the story. Add in Juan Rodriguez’ magical underscoring, and I’m thinking this is about the perfect concoction for this time of year.
In the end, though, all roads lead back to the reason we stage this story in the first place: A Christmas Carol is about transformation – not through magic, but through recognition. Recognition of our shared fragility, our shared need, our shared passage. It’s about a man who learns, almost too late, that isolation is a choice. And so is connection.
That’s why it feels right for TampaRep, and why our tagline, “Come together with TampaRep,” lands so cleanly here. You’re here at a live theatre space to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with neighbors, friends, and strangers, and to step out of the world for a short time. And hopefully re-enter it with your heart just a little… just a little more open.
May this story do what it has always done at its best: warm us, wake us, make us laugh, and send us back out a little kinder to our fellow passengers.
– Jim Sorensen, December 2025
