Richard Chamberlain Scrooges up
25 November 2004

Richard Chamberlain

Richard Chamberlain will no doubt be the handsomest Ebenezer Scrooge ever. "Well, first off, I'm an old fart now," the rugged actor claimed in a telephone interview last week. The national tour of Scrooge, a stage spectacle that grew out of the 1970 movie musical version of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, arrives at the Oakdale this week.

So who had the bright idea that the erstwhile Dr. Kildare, musketeer and miniseries megastar (of The Thornbirds and Shogun ) could inhabit the sullied soul of the ultimate Christmas party-pooper? None other than Scrooge's composer, librettist and motivating force, Leslie Bricusse, an old pal of Chamberlain's who's been pushing him to don that ominous top hat and sideburns for ages. Bricusse's other musical adventures with split personalities include Broadway's Jekyll & Hyde and the film Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory , while Chamberlain's never been strictly a leading man, having done Hamlet and Cyrano de Bergerac and making his musical mark on Broadway in My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music (which also toured to the Oakdale).

So quibble not about casting. But there's still another nagging question. For years, Chamberlain's home base has been Hawaii. Why on earth would he choose to tour the continental United States for eleven weeks in wintertime? "I sort of miss weather. I like weather." He describes Appleton, Ohio, where Scrooge stopped last week, as "gray, gray, gray and cold," but strangely appealing.

I told Chamberlain how much I'd loved his memoir Shattered Love, published last year. The book shows its worldly, well-heeled author to be not just supremely centered and karmically balanced, but eager to let his readers in on the secrets of peace and inner beauty. "I wrote it because I wanted to talk about life," he told me, though all the publishers expected of him was the usual Hollywood dirt. He did provide one tidbit of immense publicity value, coming out as a gay man. "I was finally able to do it after realizing, deep within myself, that it was a non-event." All the self-doubt and social stereotyping he'd endured was "just nonsense." Such openness and self-fulfillment can only help his interpretation of the transformative Scrooge

© 2004 Christopher Arnott

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