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Matthew Warchus, one of England’s top directors, has collaborated with Jack Thorne, author of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” on a Broadway “Christmas Carol” that I presume has hopes of becoming an annual staple. Nor would I be surprised if it does: It’s a warm-hearted staging full of clever audience-participation tricks that children will find hard to resist. I only wish it were truer in spirit to the novella, which Messrs. Thorne and Warchus have watered down to the point of insipidity. “A Christmas Carol,” after all, is supposed to be frightening—Dickens’ Scrooge is shocked, not sweet-talked, into changing his miserly ways while he still can—but this triggerless version is devoid of supernatural scare tactics, opting instead to present Scrooge as a victim of bad parenting…
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To read my review of A Christmas Carol, go here.The trailer for A Christmas Carol: