While I have decreed that this year is my year off from reviewing holiday shows, I was intrigued by the idea of Douglas H. Baker's One Christmas Carol, THEATRESCAPE's first official presentation as a producing theatre company. Deciding that this was, instead, an observation of an interesting theatrical choice, I took my first trip to the nice space in Tempe's New School for the Arts and Academics and prepared to hear once more the conversion of old Scrooge from skinflint to softy.

Baker is a veteran actor and playwright, and his stated measure of success for this show is when the audience is able to see the characters that he has been, and has stepped out of to address as another character. With this as a benchmark, the performance is a rousing success. He embodies each character so fully and creates each specter so grandly that it is possible to imagine that there are two or more people onstage in each scene. From the beginning, it's clear that he's into his characters, but there's one point during the Christmas Past scene when Scrooge looks upon himself as a forgotten child singing Christmas carols to a dying hearth, and Baker as the young Scrooge begins to cry. This isn't stage trickery or deceit. This is a man so consumed with the character that from the front row, a mere ten feet from him, I watched his eyes slowly sparkle and drip real, heartfelt tears at just the perfect moment. This goes beyond performance to actual craftsmanship. It's a moment that is repeated with many other emotions throughout the remainder of the evening.

I also compliment Baker's adaptation for sticking nearly religiously to Charles Dickens' original text. There have been so many different revisionist versions of this holiday classic that it's hard to remember what has been grafted on and what Dickens originally wrote. Baker has avoided the easy choices, such as the kindly woman as the Ghost of Christmas Past, accepting the challenge of giving the audience what Dickens intended.

There's only one major problem with this generally excellent production: the material. Anyone over the age of fifteen can recite nearly word for word much of the text to which Baker gives life. I've been affected by Scrooge's conversion time and again, but there comes a point of diminishing returns. Despite the wonderful performance and well-crafted adaptation, I found myself drifting before the intermission an hour into the piece. Perhaps a more balanced placement of the intermission might help, rather than an hour of performance, a ten-minute intermission, and then twenty more minutes of conclusion. I don't fault Baker the actor or Baker the adaptor for this more than I blame the entertainment field for over saturation of a good thing. Like a popular song that is played to death or ballet's dependable mounting of The Nutcracker, A Christmas Carol is theatre's holiday cash cow. The mediocre presentations have worn away our patience from repetition and undercut the few worthy productions.

The show has the kinds of technical faults one finds with a touring production that comes in on a Thursday and opens on the Saturday. Brenda Kennedy's lighting is a mess. The levels are all wrong, moving from inky blackness that doesn't allow the audience to see the performer's all-important facial expressions to quick, blinding bumps that are more distracting than effective. More often than not, Baker is standing feet away from a pool of light, something more actual time on the stage might cure.

If the idea of once again hearing Tiny Tim's damnably cheerful remark makes your stomach roil, try to get past the thought to see a master actor at work. This is one of those rare moments where the must-see performance overcomes the must-avoid sentiment.