A Christmas Carol – PAC NYC ★★★★

Unfortunately, those ghosts don’t make the impact you’d expect and remain surprisingly earthbound. That’s no fault of the trio of reliably terrific actresses (Nancy Opel, Crystal Lucas-Perry, and Ashlyn Maddox) playing the identically dressed specters but rather of the show’s creative team, conceiver and director Matthew Warchus and playwright Jack Thorne, who, alas, once again clearly has daddy issues.

Thorne has written many a great play (the stage adaptation of Let The Right One In is a favorite), and recently won an Emmy for his work on the stunning Netflix series Adolescence, the latter of which handled father-son dynamics in far more interesting ways than the wildly overrated Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the bloated, exposition-loaded Broadway extension of J.K. Rowling’s beloved wizard series. Thorne’s take on this Dickens favorite unfortunately bends more to a Voldemort vibe, with most of the blame for Scrooge’s miserableness being laid firmly at the feet of his father (Chris Hoch).

Choosing to wag the finger of blame at dear old dad largely robs Scrooge Jr. of his needed dramatic arc. As a result, when he has to transform into celebratory Scrooge, the major turnabout feels tepid rather than charged, and that’s even with the entire ensemble surrounding the audience from all sides and singing a gorgeously haunting number (by composer and arranger Christopher Nightingale, whose superb contributions to this show cannot be overstated) that should do, in theory, pack the necessary emotional wallop.