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"Bah! Humbug!" Since Ebenezer Scrooge first spat out that angry phrase, in the pages of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol, " published 160 years ago come Sunday, those words have summed up the bitterness of Yule phobics, soured secularists and Christmas curmudgeons.
The phrase is "Bah! Horse hockey!" down in Miller County on the flat plains of southwest Georgia. I heard Old Man Scrooge say it on stage Wednesday afternoon. There, in "A Southern Christmas Carol, " presented in Colquitt's Cotton Hall, Ebenezer Scrooge is a tight-fisted cotton gin owner, the richest and most hated man in a small Southern town in the Depression year 1933.
The show is a fresh musical translation of the well-worn story of 19th Century London. I've seen other adaptations of the work; this one really works. It's faithful to the original in much of Dickens' dialogue, character drawing and events, but it shows a sensitive ear for southern talk, music and religious sensibility. As Clarence Jordan's "Cotton Patch Gospel" is to the New Testament original, so Rob Lauer's musical is to the original Dickens story and its stagings. It is also good fun, a hoot that warms the heart
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PICTURED ABOVE: Marissa McGowen and Jordan Coughtry (in top right photo) and Rubin Singleton (in bottom left photo) in the original production of “A Southern Christmas Carol.” (Cotton Hall Productions, 2003)