‘A Christmas Carol’ that wowed New York, NBC audiences comes to Lexington

Charles Dickens “A Christmas Carol” is one of the most adapted and interpreted works in literary history, with even Mickey Mouse and the Muppets taking cracks at the enduring holiday tale.

But the version on stage at the Lexington Opera House this weekend will be a distinctly Lexington Theatre Company (The Lex) production.

“What we’re doing is bringing that Broadway world back to Lexington,” says Jeromy Smith, producing director of The Lex. “It’s not the ‘Christmas Carol’ that you’re expecting, in a good way.”

This ‘Christmas Carol’ is a version by iconic composer Alan Menken, known for Disney classics such as “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Little Mermaid,” and writer and lyricist Lynn Ahrens, whose credits include “Ragtime” and “Seussical.” It played from 1994 to 2003 at New York’s Madison Square Garden Theatre with actors such as Tim Curry, F. Murray Abraham, and The Who frontman Roger Daltrey as Scrooge. Kelsey Grammer played the part in a 2004 production for NBC that also included Jason Alexander, Jane Krakowski, Jesse L. Martin, and Jennifer Love Hewitt.

“It’s all just earworms,” says Director and Choreographer Patrick O’Neill, who has previously directed “Chicago” and “Jersey Boys” for The Lex. “The music is so great, and the tunes are so lovely and upbeat and carry through the evening that it’s kind of shocking that it’s really now just getting its due in the regions.”

The show was a collaboration of some of musical theatre’s biggest talents of the 1990s and early 21st century with multiple Tony Award nominee Michael Ockrent directing and five-time Tony winner Susan Stroman choreographing the show. During a lunchtime interview at The Lex headquarters on Alexandria Drive, O’Neill shares a text from Stroman wishing him and the show success.

“Mom’s blessing,” he says.

Musical based on Charles Dickens novel

While a lot of the discussion of the show centers on its size — a cast of more than 40, a 25-person orchestra, and big production numbers — the conversation keeps coming back to Charles Dickens’ story, an 1843 novella.

“Like any great thing we’ve seen a million times, it’s so easy to be like, ‘Oh, yeah, I know that show,” says Broadway veteran Denis Lambert, who plays Scrooge. “But the source material is pretty good. It’s actually mind-blowingly incredible. And there’s a reason it’s done all the time.”

Going back to the source material reminded Lambert that while the popular perception of miserly Scrooge is that he changes during his Christmas Eve visit by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, there is another way to look at him.

“What really jumped out to me … was that it was a story about a man who reverts to his true nature, versus a man who changes,” says Lambert, who has previously starred in The Lex’s productions of “Mary Poppins” and “A Chorus Line.” “He loses his father at eight — and he explicitly says, if you do with money, what I did, this will happen to you. Then he loses his mother, then he loses his sister, and then the love of his life breaks his heart.

“So, I just ask anybody, ‘what would you become? What kind of human being would you be?’ And so, our young actor, Zach, who plays Scrooge at 12; to meet that Scrooge, that’s the essence of who he is, and it’s through him we see how life has done something to him.”

The Lex continues to train next generation of actors

Lambert is referring to Zach Kotter, one of The Lex’s Youth Apprentices, which gets to the essence of the company’s productions: putting young actors, including Lexington youth and community actors, on stage with Broadway talent to bring shows to Lexington audiences. Smith says The Lex’s growing education programs are helping to prepare more student actors who are ready to be in a professional production, according to the visiting artists.

“It’s absolutely energizing to watch them come into the room,” says New York stage veteran Byron St. Cyr, who plays Christmas Present. “It just lifts the room.”

Lambert and O’Neill marvel that the cast includes Lexington-based actor Margo Buchanan, whose screen credits include the 1994 “Miracle on 34th Street” movie starring Richard Attenborough, as Christmas Yet To Be.

“These people that live here are treasures, who have had storied careers, and the fact that they come with the barn is like an embarrassment of riches,” O’Neill says.

Echoing a current pop-culture phenomenon, in this ‘Carol,’ the ghosts that visit Scrooge are also people from his world, “similar to ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ where you meet them as human beings, and then, through the course of his Christmas Eve journey, this fever dream, they come back as the different spirits. So, he’s kind of had these people affect him in the opening number that then come back to visit him through the course of the evening,” O’Neill says.

St. Cyr says, “It’s been really interesting to look at the joy of it, the joy of, we’re not just spirits. We are in human form at the beginning of the show and at the end, like book-ending. So, I’ve been thinking about like, how can we all be positive spirits, so to speak, around each other in terms of community?

“How are we all like the Ghost of Past, Present, and Future and we can be that to each other — how can we have that positive impact? And that’s what I keep coming back to every time I look at this script, and every time we watch these scenes happening where we see someone seeing who they used to be and what could be, and how could we be that mirror to each other?”

Once again, we’ll have a new way of looking at this familiar holiday tale.

A Christmas Carol The Musical

Performed by: The Lexington Theatre Company

Where: The Lexington Opera House, 401 West Short St.

When: 7:30 p.m. Nov. 20 and 21, 1 and 7:30 p.m. Nov. 22, and 1 and 6:30 p.m. Nov. 23

Tickets: $39-$137; lexingtontheatrecompany.org

Running time: 90 minutes with no intermission

This story was originally published November 18, 2025 at 5:00 AM.