A Christmas story.
Perhaps the Christmas story.
In fact, you should close your eyes. The special effects studio is right there, between your ears. It's called your mind's eye, and it needs some exercise every once in a while, especially nowadays.
Here, the stage is set, but you must people it.
Here, the magic of old-time radio, the magic of a finely told story - and be sure, this is magic - replaces the clutter of big-screen, top-dollar, multimedia noise that's more pop than culture.
Bah humbug, you say? Exactly.
On Thursday night, a troupe of professional actors told simply a story of life's simple pleasures, and the effect was, well, simply spellbinding.
“There's something about a live radio performance that people find really fascinating,” said actor Luke Walrath. “And Dickens' ‘Christmas Carol' seemed like the perfect story for radio.”
Walrath, along with actors Betsi Morrison and David Ackroyd, operate the Alpine Theatre Project out of a Whitefish playhouse called the O'Shaughnessy. Every year, they put on a holiday-season show, a “Yuletide Affair,” as it's known.
This year's proved a particularly spare affair: a lonely pianist playing behind six actors. No sets, no costuming, no zany action. Just a handful of microphones standing in a line.
Oh, and the sound effects table. A tiny door. A pair of shoes. Coconut shells. Bells. A pan of rocks. A spatula. A big old wind drum with a wooden crank. A length of chain. A great metal sheet of thunder.
“We put everything up on the stage with us,” Walrath said. “We wanted the audience to see everything we're doing.”
Which is a little bit strange, since most of the audience won't see it at all. Instead, they'll hear it, on Montana Public Radio, broadcast by Missoula's own KUFM on Christmas Eve at 6 p.m., and again on Christmas Day at 1 p.m.
And if, while listening, you feel transported back in time, well, that's to be expected. The show is a re-enactment of the 1939 radio classic starring Orson Welles and Lionel Barrymore.
Walrath and crew remained true to that original, right down to the sponsors. Listen to the 1939 CBS recording and you'll hear the sponsor's pitch by Campbell's Soup. Listen now to the sponsor pitch by Big Mountain ski resort, “purveyors,” the rich radio voice says, “of deep snow since 1947.”
But the performance itself might just take you a ways further back than 1939.
Close your eyes, and there is Charles Dickens himself, 31 years old and already the successful author of “The Pickwick Papers” and “Oliver Twist” and “Nicholas Nickleby.”
It's 1843, and the writer has cash-flow problems. He can't keep up with the bills at his Devonshire Terrace home, and the father of four has a fifth on the way.
He needs a quick shot of money.
So comes a visit to a sister in Manchester, whose son is lame. And there, long evening walks into neighborhoods of squalid poverty. Dickens said later he was painfully reminded of his own impoverished childhood.
And then, a thought. An inspiration, really.
These people, Dickens decided, need Christmas. Why not give it to them, and pull himself out of debt at the same time?
He found the characters ready at hand: a sickly child, an honest but ineffectual father, a selfish miser. And Dickens already had his Christmas goblins, part of a Germanic ghost story that had wormed its way into “The Pickwick Papers.”
It was a plot, for sure, but it was not yet magic. That spell would not be spun until Dickens was deep into the writing, propelled first by a businessman's calculations, but later by something mysteriously more.
The characters came to life, Dickens said, restored his own life and lifted him from depression.
“I was,” he wrote, “very much affected by the little book.”
He wept as he wrote, and laughed as he wrote, and discovered in himself the spirit of the Christmas he was creating. This was hope.
In the end, Dickens insisted on a gilt manuscript, which he had to pay for himself. He also insisted on a price tag of just five shillings, which assured most all could afford his “little book.”
The result was a financial stretch, but a personal achievement - a gift, really, to Everyman. And to us, the constant present of his enduring tradition. The family gathering. The feast. The drink, the gifts, the charity.
By some accounts, “A Christmas Carol” saved the season from Cromwell's Puritans, who had been working hard to untangle the birth of Christ from the pagan Saturnalia festival of mid-winter, not to mention the Germanic season of Yule.
They wanted somber piety. They were his Scrooge.
“Bah!” cried Ackroyd as the great humbuggerer, voice dripping disdain. “Bah!”
The story moves quickly for radio, no time for delay.
“It was a real challenge,” Walrath said. “On live radio, you can't have the dead space that would usually be filled with visual action. The actors can't fall back on physicality or visual cues, so they have to do everything with their voices.”
Well, almost everything. The one nod to modernity is Betsi Morrison's high-tech microphone, which dropped her voice a full octave and a half for her role as the Ghost of Christmas Past.
Live and in person, it was strange to hear that great big voice coming out of the tiny woman. On radio, however, the Ghost rears large as life.
“Those old radio guys really knew how to do it,” Walrath said. “Just being able to simply convey a character through our voice is a real skill.”
But what really shines here is Dickens' story, not so much a story of redemption as a travelogue following Scrooge's lifelong path to humbuggery. It's less about how to get back from there, than about how not to get there in the first place.
“If you have anything to teach me,” the repentant miser finally cries, “then let me profit by it.”
As profit we all do, when we slow down enough to listen. This time of year especially, Walrath notes, it's easy to lose sight of simple truths amid the glittering holiday jumble.
But tune in, quiet down, close your eyes and let your imagination loose, and the season's excess falls away.
“Ah,” sighs a relieved Scrooge. “Christmas Day. Then I haven't missed it!”
Shhhhh!
Montana Public Radio stations across western Montana will air “A Christmas Carol” at 6 p.m. Christmas Eve and 1 p.m. Christmas Day on MTPR outlets in Butte, Dillon, Great Falls, Hamilton, Helena, Kalispell, Marysville, Missoula, Swan Lake, Whitefish and White Sulphur Springs.
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