Crime & Punishment, A Comedy
With Ebenezer Scrooge's BIG San Diego Christmas Show, Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen gave The Old Globe's Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre its version of the Donald and Darlene Shiley Stage's How the Grinch Stole Christmas: an annual event that tweaked a holiday classic into something comedic and sweetly feel-good — no mean feat, given the whole ghost story structure, horrible protagonist, and climactic threat of death and infamy. It surely helped that the story is so well known that its more alarming aspects have been blunted by familiarity. Here, the two are considerably more daring, taking a book they themselves claim "you didn't read in high school" — by an author famous for his renderings of tortured moral crises, about a man who commits a murder and resolves to get away with it — and turning it into something wacky, sort of like Young Frankenstein. The result is sort of Dostoevsky defanged, formally a comedy, but relying mostly on gags and references for its laughs. (A wedding planner named Anna Karenina!) There are some good lines: when someone mentions an older man's wandering eye, his would-be wife cries, "He's having that fixed!" But it's not entirely clear why it exists in the way that it does. It feels almost like a dare: take one of the darkest stories in the canon, and make it funny — while still keeping the stuff about murder and morality. The cast is game, the staging is inventive, and the puppets are delightful. But the emotional whiplash is dizzying.
When
Ongoing until Sunday, August 20, 2023
Hours
| Sundays, 2pm |
| Fridays, 7:30pm |
| Saturdays, 7:30pm |