Straight to the heart 

Upstart Crows of Santa Fe are bringing Charles Dickens’ holiday classic “A Christmas Carol” to stage.

The performances will feature three actors: one reading as Scrooge and the narrator, and the other two reading the other parts.

“This year, we’ve got a great group who have all caught on very quickly,” Caryl Farkas, show director, said. “They’re risk-takers, which makes them good actors and I think we’ve had a lot of fun with it.”

Rather than a theatrical version, the Upstart Crows staging has actors dressed in Victorian clothes reading straight from the performance script, which Farkas said helps highlight the characters.

“You’re getting more of a sense of those characters as Dickens saw them, as opposed to how some director might have wanted to conceive them,” Farkas said.

Usually, the annual “A Christmas Carol” production features a youth and an adult cast, but this year, all four casts are adults.

Farkas said that in years past, she has noticed kids tend to be less inhibited and dive into voices more than adults. However, this year, the cast has dived in and adapted quickly to various challenges.

“I challenge the new actors to find the bits of Shakespeare in that story,” Farkas said, “and Dickens has actually got four different places where he quotes Shakespeare in ‘A Christmas Carol.’”

Farkas urges the audience to look out for these Shakespearean lines and hopes they encounter the work through the reading differently than a movie or play version.

“When you’re doing a dramatic reading, it entirely rests upon the words, your delivery of the words, and Dickens has so carefully crafted the way these words string together,” Farkas said.

She said that a reading is different because you are seeing the story through Dickens’ eyes rather than a director’s, and getting to see how he uses rhetorical devices, sounds and structures to go straight to the audience’s heart.

“You’ve got a master at work who has created an experience that you’re encountering through your ears,” she said.