'We're gonna have to face the water.' Cape Cod's environmental spin on 'A Christmas Carol'
In case you didn't know, Ebenezer Scrooge lives on Cape Cod. He's not the same Scrooge that Charles Dickens wrote about, though their stories bear resemblance. This Scrooge is the CEO of Ebbin-Tide Coal Company.
Maureen Condon, director and producer of "Scrooge's Cape Cod Christmas Carol," said the story came to her in 2018, and only took three weeks to write. The musical has an all-Cape Cod cast, with one exception, and offers an environmental spin on the classic tale.
The musical, debuted Nov. 17 at Wellfleet Preservation Hall , follows Ebenezer Scrooge, played by Bill Farrell, a work-crazed CEO who makes his employees work during the holidays and has no care or desire to understand why his fossil fuel business Ebbin-Tide might impact our planet.
His daughter, Hannah, (played by Susanna Creel) is a regional director of the US Environmental Protection Agency, and tries to help her father understand why what he's doing is wrong.
"Dad, if you don't do what you oughta, we're gonna have to face the water, and watch the shores of Cape Cod fade away," are some of the lyrics sung by Creel in a song called "Face the Water."
Scrooge is met by the Ghost of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, embodied in the form of former Vice President Al Gore (played by Keith Richard Chamberlain) and taken on a journey to understand why his actions have serious consequences.
Condon, who also directed "CRUDE: THE CLIMATE CHANGE MUSICAL," used to work for a weather company in marketing and communications, often taking data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration , and putting it in plain terms for television weather newscasters.
"My job was to take the scientific information and translate it and make it easy to understand with the audience, buyers and other people we don't our weather data to," said Condon.
On its website, in a section called Climate Change, NASA reports that fossil fuels harm the environment and contribute to climate change.
"The storms we're having nowadays used to be called 100-year storms, because they only happened every 100 years. Now we're seeing them every couple of months," said Condon. "The weather's getting out of sync with what we're used to."
The musical came in second place in the Alliance for Community Media Northeast's 2024 Nor'Easter Awards . Condon hopes to bring the musical back to screens, and live on stage in 2025.
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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: "Scrooge's Cape Cod Christmas Carol" remind us to take care of planet.
