A Christmas Carol, Five Actors, and One Very Busy Ghost Storyteller
by Avery Anderson
Tampa Bay doesn’t really do Christmas the way a snow globe imagines it. No flurries, no horse-drawn sleighs, no one in mittens unless it's because you are an influencer at XMAS Bar.
And yet, every December, there’s a couple of places in town where you can reliably watch a rich man get haunted into becoming a better person.
This year, one option is freeFall Theatre, where “A Christmas Carol: in Concert” returns for a limited holiday run — part concert, part live audiobook, part Victorian fever dream splashed across a giant video wall.
At the center of it all is Matthew McGee, standing at a podium and playing every single character in Charles Dickens’ story while four singers handle the score.
“I think people love A Christmas Carol because this awful rich guy who you know he's not a good person,” McGee says. “He makes people's lives very bad… he has an opportunity to see the error of his ways and he turns out to be a better person in the end.”
Then he adds the part that might be the real draw, especially right now:
“I think people love the idea that they might have a second chance to be better, you know?”
From snow machines to car radios to a concert on Central
This is not freeFall’s first dance with Scrooge.
Back when the company moved into its Central Avenue home in 2011, artistic director Eric Davis wanted A Christmas Carol to become a full-on annual spectacle.
“It was a big production,” McGee remembers. “There were a lot of children involved. There were a lot of characters, a lot of costumes, a lot of props, a lot of special effects. It snowed every night, you know, during the finale.”
They did that version for several years. Then freeFall did what freeFall does: it zigged. Davis swapped in Peter and the Starcatcher, then a rep run of Peter and the Starcatcher and a new version of Peter Pan, and eventually a string of other holiday-adjacent plays that still turned the building into a December destination.
Then came 2020.
With audiences in their cars instead of the theater, Davis reimagined A Christmas Carol as a drive-in event:
- McGee recorded the entire narration in a studio.
- Four singers performed the score live.
- The orchestra was pre-recorded.
- And projected on a screen were animated versions of illustrator P.J. Lynch’s images from the book.
“Eric said, ‘I think I have an idea to make this a multimedia presentation, a drive-in show that they can enjoy where there are four singers who sing the beautiful score… and we will do excerpts from the novel,’” McGee says.
What was supposed to be a pandemic workaround turned out to be something else: a version of A Christmas Carol that actually leaned harder into Dickens’ language instead of away from it.
Last year, Davis brought the concept back inside and onto freeFall’s indoor stage to see if it could stand on its own without the cars. It did. This year, the concert is back again for another limited run — and freeFall is quietly building the bones of a new holiday tradition.
“I think we're going to start featuring Christmas Carol pretty much as like a very limited run annual event type thing,” McGee says. “I think you'll you'll see different narrators like the candlelight processional… and it really does lend itself to that.”
How this version actually works (and why it’s not just people standing and singing)
So what are you walking into if you buy a ticket?
Onstage, it looks more like a concert than a traditional play:
- A large video wall runs the length of the back wall, constantly shifting through illustrations.
- McGee stands at a central podium, narrating from Dickens’ text and voicing every character.
- Four singer-actors step forward when the music takes over.
“This musical by Bruce Greer and Keith Ferguson, it's got some beautiful original music that laces in with classic public domain Christmas carol… like ‘God Rest You Merry Gentlemen’ and all that kind of stuff,” McGee explains.
“When I'm standing there in the center at my little podium reading the story, it happens behind me,” he says. “When I play Scrooge, you'll see the illustration of Scrooge and then the next when the next person talks Bob Cratchit, you'll see that and it just it's just constant. The animation never stops.”
When a song begins, the visuals pause on something simpler — almost like a screensaver — with the song title and the singer’s name, and one of the four performers steps into focus.
Vocally, each singer covers a cluster of roles:
- Davis takes on Scrooge, Marley and Mr. Fezziwig in the musical numbers.
- Sara DelBeato sings Mrs. Cratchit, the charwoman and other roles.
- Heather Baird voices Belle and other women in Scrooge’s life.
- Jonathan Harrison, familiar to many as freeFall’s house manager, sings Bob Cratchit and other men in the story.
McGee, meanwhile, is doing what amounts to a one-person radio play in real time.
Stealing from every Scrooge — but playing it straight
McGee has seen enough Christmas Carol adaptations to qualify as a specialist at this point.
He points to the George C. Scott television version as the first one he remembers watching as a kid, and still his favorite. He loves the Albert Finney movie Scrooge. He even has a soft spot for Jim Carrey’s motion-capture version.
And then, of course, there are the Muppets.
“I mean, who would have thought that Michael Caine would have been in a Muppet movie and played it absolutely serious,” McGee says. “It's probably one of Michael Cane's finest performances ever and he just plays Scrooge.”
That’s the key he keeps coming back to.
“I think everyone I've ever seen probably plays into how I play Scrooge,” he says. “But I try to really do what Michael Caine does and and play that character the most real throughout the whole piece because um I think it it works so well for him. So, who am I to, you know, to disagree with the great Michael Caine or not, you know, steal from the best.”
He’s also drawing on a weirder, more niche credit: a three-actor show called “Scrooge in Rouge,” where an English music hall troupe tries to stage A Christmas Carol after most of the cast falls ill.
“In that particular show it kind of helped me because with only three people I played Lottie Obligato which was a soprano in the music hall… and that role plays everything. The turkey boy, Mrs. Cratchit, the ghost of Christmas Past,” he says. “I played a variety of roles in that show and all different genders.”
“So I have to do the same in this particular show and do those voices and that really primed me for being able to do it.”
There’s also something personally satisfying about getting to play Scrooge at all.
“As an actor I would not necessarily be cast in that,” McGee says. “I would probably be The Ghost of Christmas present or Mr. Fezziwig most most likely in a big production. I've always wanted to play Scrooge because I love the character so much.”
Why this still lands in 2025
Underneath the animated ghosts and the concert setup, the piece is surprisingly old-school: it’s basically Dickens, intact.
“You're going to get more of the real story,” McGee says.
The concert uses less of the musical’s dialogue and more of Dickens’ original language. The adaptation weaves in chunks of the novel wholesale — descriptions, narration, turns of phrase you’d only normally catch if you actually sat down and read the book.
“So you are really getting Christmas Carol as close to if you just sat down in your home and read it yourself.” McGee says. “You get a lot of the story in a really kind of exciting way and I think some of the technology we use for it is really impressive.”
He isn’t shy about why he thinks the story itself still hits.
He worries that “there's no sort of redemptive arc to a lot of entertainment anymore,” and A Christmas Carol is the rare piece of pop culture that unapologetically builds to one. The “financial inequities” Dickens wrote about still feel familiar. The ghosts are still spooky. And we’re still invested in whether one stubborn man can be talked into being decent.
“Deep at its core, it is really just a redemptive story,” McGee says. “And I I think people love the idea that they might have a second chance to be better.”
If you go
A Christmas Carol: in Concert plays a limited 12-performance run at freeFall Theatre in West St. Petersburg beginning Dec. 12. Performances run straight through at about 80 minutes.
For exact dates, times, and tickets, visit freefalltheatre.com or call the box office at 727-498-5205.