'A Christmas Carol' takes a local slant in Foster Festival presentation

Jamie Williams has played the role of Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol before, but never quite like he will this upcoming weekend. 

The former Stratford actor takes on the famous curmudgeon in his own adaptation of the Dickens tale, A Niagara Christmas Carol, for three staged readings presented by the Foster Festival in St. Catharines.

With the festival looking for something to offer for the holiday season, and the 200th anniversary of the granting of the charter to begin construction of the first Welland Canal being marked this year, it made perfect sense to centre the story around the local engineering marvel. 

So Williams and Emily Oriold, the Foster Festival’s artistic director, connected with Adrian Petry, the St. Catharines Museum and Welland Canals Centre’s historian and public services coordinator, for a deep dive into local history. 

In this new version of the holiday classic, a young Scrooge has emigrated to Lower Canada with his father. He meets a young lady and follows her back to Upper Canada, specifically to the Niagara region, where he opens his money-lending business with his partner Marley.

“The story was written in 1840,” Williams explains. “Construction on the Welland Canal had started about a decade and a half before that. It would have still been going on then. All these immigrant Irish workers were here working on the canal.”

At the heart of Charles Dickens’ original story are the social issues of 1800s England. Williams points out that the mmigrants working on the canal toiled under harsh, horrible Niagara conditions, many losing their lives in the process. That would have posed social issues for the families left behind.

“And when things were waffling with the canal by 1840,” says Williams, “many of those workers  were laid off and living in nearby shanty towns along the banks. They were destitute, parading up and down the streets of St. Catharines looking for bread or work.”

Even historical figure William Hamilton Merritt, the soldier, businessperson and politician known as the driving force behind the canal, was experiencing financial difficulty at the time. There was some talk of the government taking over the canal as many contractors were overdue payments. 

Merritt and his wife Catharine Prendergast become central figures in the Niagara version of the story. Learning from Petry that the Merritt’s actually did collect charity for the workers affected by the layoffs, that is rolled into the play’s script. 

In addition to the well-known characters of  Scrooge, Marley, Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim and the ghosts who visit Scrooge, the play is riddled with local and historical references beyond the Merritts. 

“There’s an interesting tie-in with the Coloured Corps,” explains Williams, “which was a militia group that developed out of a Coloured Regiment from the War of 1812. But in the 1840s it was being used to police the violence and the dissent amongst Irish workers along the canal.”

There’s a character named Private Johnson from that militia inserted into a scene with Christmas Present. Johnson is fictional, as is a character named Josiah Smith, a contractor in this adaptation. Williams explains that as he continues to look deeper into canal history with Petry, he hopes to eventually replace these ‘placeholder’ characters with ones based on actual historical figures. 

As well, when Christmas Past visits Scrooge, he takes him back to his days as an apprentice in Lower Canada, where this Canadian Scrooge studied under James McGill, the founder of the university that still bears his name. 

And with a tongue-in-cheek reference to Canadiana, one of the ghosts appears as a voyageur. 

Oriold is directing the readings while Williams, who appeared in past  A Christmas Carol productions at Edmonton’s Citadel Theater and Morrisburg’s Upper Canada Playhouse, will play Scrooge. 

He is joined by a number of actors with Shaw experience, including Molly Atkinson, Claire Jullien, Patrick McManus and Graeme Somerville. Continuing a partnership with Ridley College, whose Mandeville Theatre has become the Foster Festival’s home, students Jonah Tredway, Markus Onclin, and Faith Nikel take on roles, as does Fonthill student Emerson Keay. The cast is rounded out by Jasmine Case, Edmond Clark, Isaiah Kolundzic and Paul Ewen Wilson.

“It's a great company of professional actors,” says Williams, the Foster Festival’s artistic associate. “Lots of experience there. The actors are not just standing behind music stands. We add music, costumes and sound effects. This will be a full-on performance.”

The cast will be joined by Petry after each performance for a Q & A session about Williams’ adaptation and the story behind it. 

Both Oriold and Williams promise that this original take on the well-known classic will be an annual tradition for the festival. They expect that the 2025 version will be a full stage production, with even more historical elements potentially added to the play. 

“I'm really excited because I love this story, and I have since I was a kid,” Williams enthuses. It's the best redemption story I know of, and that is still front and centre in where Scrooge is coming from and the changes he undergoes. What’s wonderful is all of this history acts as a catalyst for all of that.”

There are a few tickets left for the 7 p.m. performance Friday, Dec. 6 at the St. Catharines Museum as well as for two shows this weekend at Ridley's Mandeville Theatre - Dec. 7 at 7 p.m. and Dec. 8 at 2 p.m. Cake Cafe from Virgil and Vineland Estates Winery will be on hand to offer refreshments. For information and to purchase tickets call the Foster Festival box office at 1-844-735-4832, extension 3 or visit the website.