Arts Review

Cuento Navideño: Bah Humbug in the Barrio

Dios mio, Scrooge, how you’ve changed. You’ve lost a little height since the last time I saw you, and you’ve really grown out your hair. Your skin is much less pale than it was, and your cheeks not so shriveled – all those burritos you’ve been wolfing down are beginning to show (and I’ll bet they’ve pushed your cholesterol count as high as your bank balance). The jacket you’re wearing is considerably more fashionable than the Victorian frock you usually sport – but is that a skirt underneath it? You are far from the man you were when Charles Dickens introduced you 168 Decembers back.

What playwright and director Rupert Reyes has managed with everyone’s favorite yuletide skinflint in this new Teatro Vivo production is nothing less than a full-body makeover: dress, race, and gender. But his transformation of the 19th century Londoner into a latter-day Latina isn’t merely cosmetic. As a female in a culture that places such a premium on family and the woman’s place in the home, the character is forced to pay a higher price for her decision to pursue success in business at the expense of marriage and children. With the miser in Cuento Navideño: Bah Humbug in the Barrio, the hard shell around her heart has been built up by defying deeply ingrained traditions that a man in England would not have had to a century and a half ago. You feel a deeper sense of struggle and sacrifice in the character here than in the average adaptation of A Christmas Carol.

That said, you won’t have any trouble recognizing this figure as Scrooge. Evangelina Cruz, as she’s named, is still as hard and sharp as flint, still solitary as an oyster, still refusing invitations to dinner from her cheerful nephew (a genial Mario Ramirez), still berating her humble and underappreciated clerk (here a single mom named Amelia, played with soft-spoken charm by Annabel Guevara), and still callously dismissing the indigent and needy to workhouses, prisons, and death. Reyes wisely preserves the essentials of the character from the original (though I’d swear a few of Evangelina’s lines were lifted intact from recent Republican debates), and Mary Alice Carnes finds a steely edge in the businesswoman’s manner that pushes her affronts from churlish to chilling; like every good Scrooge, she’s divorced herself from the human race. Which is what propels her deceased partner to return from the grave and urge Evangelina to change her ways. Reyes omits the trio of Christmas spirits and leaves the job of redemption solely to the Marley proxy, Teodora, a ghost with a taste for wisecracks and tequila, played with relish by Yvonne Flores, and the ex-partner’s expanded stage time allows the spirit to flesh out, as it were, her history with Evangelina and develop a bond that we don’t typically see in this story, a bond that helps humanize both. They are characters who have, in a sense, lost family and are in need of that connection. This Christmas Carol shows us how they find it: in each other, in their blood relations, in others close to them, in their heritage, in all humanity. Teatro Vivo’s shows often boast a strong family feel, but this sweet Cuento Navideño is truly one for the whole familia.

This article appears in December 16 • 2011.