Neil Gaiman's A Christmas Carol Gets a Two-Night Stand in New York City
Gaiman has been performing such readings for almost a decade now.
Beloved writer Neil Gaiman is trying on his Charles Dickens impression again, launching a two-night reading of A Christmas Carol for fans in New York City. The author and comic book writer announced on Bluesky last night that he would be holding court for two nights at New York's Town Hall in December. This is the most recent time he's broken out the book, since 2014, when the Sandman creator read Dickens' classic for the New York Public Library, from an annotated edition by Dickens himself. The wardrobe he has to go along with it provides a striking image for the venue poster for the new event.
This year's event will take place on December 18th and 19th. Tickets go on sale this Friday, November 3, at 10 a.m. ET.
You can see the poster below.
Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol might be one of the most frequently adapted and reinvented stories of all time. Centering on a greedy man who needs to learn the value of empathy and the meaning of Christmas, A Christmas Carol seems to remain relevant and open to reinvention generation after generation, presumably in part because Scrooge and his supporting cast are archetypes, not especially rooted in the London of Dickens's time. Scrooged remains a popular reinvention of the story, and that one (like Spirited, released last year on Apple TV+) acknowledges that the Dickens story exists and riffs on it openly.
The story, which is in the public domain, has been the subject of many film and TV adaptations ranging from great to garbage. In 2022 alone, aside from Spirited, which stars Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell, there was also A Christmas Karen, an independent film from FilmRise that casts a woman in the Scrooge role, which is actually fairly rare/ and a more straightforward, animated adaptation of the story from Netflix, starring Luke Evans and Olivia Colman.