This holiday season, after an estimated 1,100 performances of A Christmas Carol, local actor Gary Neal Johnson will be taking his final bow as Ebenezer Scrooge. Johnson took over the lead role in 2000 after playing many other characters over the KC Rep production’s 40-year history, including Jacob Marley, Charles Dickens and Old Joe. Although it hasn’t been confirmed, Johnson is suspected of holding the record for an actor playing Scrooge in A Christmas Carol in the United States.
Much like the Kansas City Ballet’s annual performance of The Nutcracker, A Christmas Carol is an iconic part of KC’s holiday traditions. Johnson’s departure is the end of an era.
After playing Ebenezer Scrooge for 25 years, do you still get nervous? What does it feel like to come on stage and do something that’s so well trod to you? There’s nothing better than getting to do a character over a thousand times. The comfort level, the nerve, the nervous element is diminished considerably. You can spend more time listening on stage than having to sweat remembering your next line. I love it. I wish every actor could have the luxury.
Having played Scrooge so many times, what parts of the performance stick with you? The ones I enjoy the most are, one, the counting house. I don’t know how familiar you are with the story, but [in] the opening scene, Scrooge is in the counting house with his employee, Bob Cratchit, and he’s visited by his nephew, Fred, and by a couple solicitors, and he’s just as crabby as all get out. That’s kind of fun, number one, but it’s also one of the few times in the play that Scrooge gets to talk to real human beings. Other times he’s either talking to himself or he’s talking to a ghost. [I also enjoy] the very end of the play when [Scrooge] is talking to the phantom.
The poet Billy Collins talks about how memorizing a poem is the next level of understanding or internalizing the poem. How has your relationship to the text changed or evolved over all these years? The text is everything. It gives you clues and, more often than not, playing a character is a mystery to be solved. The more you read it, the more there is to discover and the deeper you can go because of clues. Even after 25 years of doing this guy, I’m still surprised to find things that I’m hearing for the first time, that I’ve heard a thousand times, that suddenly strike me in a different way and I realize, “Oh, that’s delicious. That’s wonderful.”
I’ve often heard it said that in live theater, the audience is the secret extra cast member of any production. Have you felt much variation in performing for different people over 25 years? Oh, sure. From one night to the next, the audience can be as different as night and day. I agree with the fact that the audience is a vital member of the—I don’t know if I want to say the cast, but certainly of the experience. The audience has an effect, whether they know it or not. Their energy can energize a cast and heighten the experience for the actors, which in turn heightens the experience for the audience. They always come ready to contribute to a good time.
I read a quote from you about how you were looking forward to seeing the production from the audience. What will it be like to sit in that same theater and experience the production not as Ebenezer Scrooge? I have a question I’m often asked in interviews over the years. They want to talk about why The Christmas Carol affects the audience in this way or that way or whatnot. And the truth of that is I don’t know. I look forward to seeing what they do with it from now on.
GO: Catch Gary Neal Johnson and the rest of the KC Rep cast’s production of A Christmas Carol November 22–December 27 at Spencer Theatre, kcrep.org.
