This Bay Area production of ‘A Christmas Carol’ emphasizes the actual carols

The pop-culture hallmarks of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” are ghosts, a boy on crutches and a mean old man. And while those are all central elements of the story, most people forget that the transformation of the most famous miser in literary history, Ebenezer Scrooge, hinges on an incident with a young caroler that Scrooge recalls fairly early in the 1843 novella. The key to the classic holiday tale — an actual Christmas carol — is right there in the name, and yet almost everyone overlooks it.

Not so Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s staging of the story. Returning for its second year, and running through Dec. 24 at the Veterans Memorial Building in Santa Cruz, “A Christmas Carol” is once again packed with more than a dozen Christmas carols sung throughout, about half of which are new this year. While the biggest draws for the holiday show might be local favorite actor Mike Ryan as Scrooge and an elegant stage adaptation of the story from SCS Artistic Director Charles Pasternak that’s remarkably faithful to Dickens’ text, those who saw its debut last year can attest that another big part of its charm is its attention to the music.

Its success in that department is largely due to the show’s music director Luke Shepherd, a lecturer in UCSC’s Music Department who self-identifies as “a Christmas carol nerd.” But even though Shepherd has been singing and studying carols his whole life, choosing them for the show wasn’t always easy.

“We’ve been really deliberate about which Christmas carols we’ve chosen,” Shepherd says. “Because there’s such a long and rich history of carols, and so narrowing it down to, you know, the 15 or 16 that we wanted to actually use was a little more difficult. I mean, everyone has a favorite carol. And Charles and I, sitting down for the very first time, we started naming what carols are our favorites, or that we think belong in the show, even if we don’t necessarily know where they belong in the show or how they’re in conversation with the Dickens text.”

“Luke Shepherd is just a genius,” says Pasternak. “I met him by happenstance, by great luck. A friend — an actor that was working here had gone to grad school with him — recommended him to me. He had just moved to Santa Cruz because his husband is a pastor here, and so Luke came and started teaching at the university. And he’s just a genius. I mean, he did composition and sound design for (the SCS productions of) ‘Hamlet,’ ‘The Importance of Being Ernest’ and ‘The Glass Menagerie’ in 2024, and especially ‘Menagerie’ and ‘Hamlet’ I thought were unbelievable sound designs. And then this year, he music-directed ‘Into the Woods’ and he played live every show, which means he was sitting in a corner playing live piano while running tracks off his pedals while conducting the actors.”

For “A Christmas Carol,” Shepherd arranged the carols and taught the actors four-part harmonies for them; he sings one of the parts himself. He considers them central to conveying the message that Dickens intended.

“The themes of redemption and forgiveness, human kindness — I mean, they’re in every page of the novella, and Dickens talking about the high and the low in the society, the rich and the poor. So we wanted to specifically pick carols that would be in conversation with the juxtaposition that we see in our modern society of the rich and the poor, and how on a certain level — and certainly the most important level — we really are all the same.”

The carol that set the tone for both Shepherd and Pasternak is the one they chose for their opening last year, and returns this year. “In the Bleak Midwinter” is based on a poem by Christina Rossetti that was ironically first published under the title “A Christmas Carol” in 1872. They are not alone in their love for it; it was chosen as the best Christmas carol of all time in a poll of choirmasters and choral experts in 2008.

“We wanted a carol that was moody to begin with,” says Shepherd. “But the last lines of the carol are the most important ones for me: ‘What can I offer poor as I am / If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb / If I were a wise one, I would do my part / So what can I offer — all my heart.’ And we thought, ‘That’s it. That’s the universality of what everyone has to offer another person.’ What we have to offer is ourselves. It’s that relationship with our fellow man. It’s that relationship of love and grace and forgiveness. And so we knew that was a conversation with the Dickens text right off the bat. And from then on, we started whittling away at the carols that offered a similar message.”

“I’ll say unabashedly that there are, like, four or five carols that I just start tearing up at no matter what,” says Pasternak. “‘In the Bleak Midwinter,’ I just find so beautiful and haunting, and sad and melancholy, and the perfect way to start this story.”

Both familiar favorites like “Good King Wenceslas” and more obscure era-appropriate carols punctuate subsequent moments throughout the story, winding up with a rousing “O Come, All Ye Faithful” after the inspiring conclusion. Pasternak looks forward to rotating more suggestions from both the SCS crew and the audience in future productions.

“We want traditional carols and we don’t want modern Christmas music. It’s about threading the needle — what works where, what tone are we looking for?” he says. “There are a ton that have gotten close a few times, just never broken through. We want to change carols every year — if we haven’t done your favorite yet, let us know what it is. And I’ll bet in the next five to 10 years, if we’re lucky enough to be doing this that long, it’ll get in there, right? It’ll get called up.”

Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s “A Christmas Carol” runs through Dec. 24 at the Veterans Memorial Building, 846 Front St., Santa Cruz. Tickets at santacruzshakespeare.org.