We've seen old Scrooges and fat Scrooges and bearded ones and bald-headed ones. Now for Dallas Theater Center's annual staging of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, we'll get to see a tall, good-looking one. And three other lanky chaps in the other major male roles.
As Scrooge, it's Kurt Rhoads, a DTC company member in the 1980s and co-star of last spring's dynamite DTC production of Horton Foote's Dividing the Estate. He also played the title role in last fall's season opener, Henry IV. It's Rhoads' first time as the old miser for DTC. He'll be directed and choreographed by Joel Ferrell, who directed Estate and then Cabaret last spring.
Rhoads now lives in upstate New York with actress-wife Nance Williamson, who acted with him in Estate. Rhoads had a busy summer, he says, directing a production of Comedy of Errors for the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, then playing Mark Antony in Julius Caesar as Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C. How does he feel about taking on Scrooge starting in November? "Can't wait to lean into him," says Rhoads.
Cast as the pre-Humbug Young Ebenezer is Dallas actor Alexander Ross, who sang and danced in Cabaret and just recently played the lead in Uptown Players' musical Crazy, Just Like Me. Like Rhoads, he's a tall fellow and quite adept at English accents (his parents are British). "Exciting indeed," Ross says of his part in the family holiday drama.
Playing Bob Cratchit will be DTC company member Lee Trull, currently throwing his long limbs about as one of the clown characters in The Tempest. And as Ebenezer's nephew Fred, Ferrell has cast another tall drink of Christmas punch in company member Steven Walters, who's also in Tempest, playing the romantic lead, Prince Ferdinand.
So it'll be different actors in the same version of A Christmas Carol that DTC has been staging for the past few years, the one adapted by Richard Hellesen, with lively versions of traditional English carols and hymns throughout. As in the past, the show will return DTC to the Kalita Humphreys Theater on Turtle Creek. Tickets for it are sold separately from the season subscription.
A Christmas Carol opens November 25 and runs through Christmas Eve. For reservations, call 214-880-0202.
