Illustration by Jessica Dunham
The bed is empty, the nightshirt laid aside. No prize turkey hangs in the poulterer’s shop window. The spirits who each year transform a sour curmudgeon into a giddy schoolboy are taking this Christmas off. And Bruce Cromer, Cincinnati’s iconic Ebenezer Scrooge, is looking for other ways to stay busy, because Playhouse in the Park’s Marx Theatre stage isn’t just dark this month—it’s gone.
It’s difficult to imagine a local holiday season without Scrooge. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens’s 1843 masterpiece about a bitter old miser who finds redemption and happiness following the visit of three Christmas spirits, has been a Playhouse in the Park tradition since 1991. Along with The Nutcracker from Cincinnati Ballet, the tree lighting at Fountain Square, the model trains at Union Terminal, the manger at Krohn Conservatory, and Cincinnati Zoo’s Festival of Lights, Scrooge’s annual redemption at the Playhouse has been a Queen City holiday touchstone for more than a generation.
But have no fear: Our favorite penny pincher’s absence this month will be as brief as his Christmas Eve slumber. Next year, audiences will settle back in the glittering new Moe and Jack’s Place – The Rouse Theatre, which is rising steadily these days atop Mt. Adams, and enjoy a new set, new script, new staging technology, and new faces along with the timeless story.
“I loved the old theater,” Cromer says of the now-demolished Marx, “but it was getting tired. It didn’t have the technology, of course, that’s available now that can make the theater experience much richer. The new theater will be exciting with all those bells and whistles that audiences will just love.”
Cromer embraced every idiosyncrasy of the Marx stage—on it, above it, and below it. He knew the lifts, the lofts, the ropes and pulleys, the lights, and the stage angles as well as he knew his family room in Yellow Springs. It was his home for the holidays for 25 years, after all, initially as the long-suffering Bob Cratchit and, since 2005, in the lead role as Ebenezer Scrooge. “After eight years, I did get tired of Bob Cratchit,” Cromer admits with a sly smile. “But that’s because he’s off stage a lot, and I don’t do well when I’m off stage.”
Cromer joined the cast in 1997 with Joneal Joplin, an accomplished actor from St. Louis who was suddenly thrust into the lead role following the untimely death of the Playhouse’s first Scrooge, Alan Mixon. “Jop is a great physical actor and teacher,” Cromer says of his predecessor. “He’s a better character actor and more of a star than me. He knows how to lead a show.” Audiences who have watched Cromer dominate the Playhouse stage may not agree with his modest self-evaluation, but it’s genuine and respectful of the man whose retirement brought him to center stage.
Scrooge is almost always in the Dickens spotlight, either snarling and bullying his way through a bleak Victorian London or melting in a sea of melancholy as he watches his life move through episodes of abandonment, disappointment, and regret. Joplin didn’t have an understudy, so Cromer remembers being stunned when director Michael Haney approached him about taking the lead role two years before Joplin retired. “I’m like, What?” he remembers thinking. “I’m too young. I can’t be the hard ass that Joneal is.” He’s quick to tag Joplin with the “hard ass” moniker only in his portrayal of Scrooge. Joplin, he says, is a “fabulous human being” who could switch off his backstage smile with his first booming “Bah Humbug!” Cromer wondered, Could I do that?
Cromer credits the script, written by Howard Dallin, as having given directors and actors opportunity to develop the Scrooge and Cratchit characters beyond one-dimensional, almost cartoonish personas. Over the years, Cromer says, that’s encouraged tweaks here and there—tweaks that can be born on the first day at the reading table or backstage just minutes before the performance begins.
“You know how it’s soooo cold in Scrooge’s office?” Cromer asks, shivering as he speaks. “In the book, it’s so cold that the ink in the inkwell freezes, and we need the audience to feel that.” So, each year, Haney would work with the actor who played Bob Cratchit on the scene where he delivers the day’s mail to Scrooge. Haney, Cromer, and Cratchit would brainstorm the delivery, sometimes just minutes before the curtain opened. “It’s soooo cold that the letters are frozen to Bob’s hand,” Cromer says, laughing as he drapes his body over the table between us. “It’s the comic relief the audience needs.”
It always works, he says, but it’s not the biggest belly laugh. “Cratchit flipping up his long coat to warm his butt over the coals? That gets the biggest laugh from kids and adults alike and, you know, up to that point the play is pretty dark. They now know it’s OK to laugh.”
Cromer is a man at ease these days. He retired last year as a professor at Wright State University, where he mentored students who occasionally shared the Playhouse stage with him. They’d be carolers, dancers, and strollers—actors with no lines but still integral to setting the holiday scene. When he played Bob Cratchit, the first actor to play his son, Peter, was one of his students.
Cromer isn’t sure how many Tiny Tims he hoisted on his shoulder over the years, but he remembers his last one. Seventh-grader Braydon Underwood starred in the play’s most empathetic role last year—the oldest Tim to have graced the stage. All actors had to be vaccinated for COVID-19, and you had to be at least 12 to be vaccinated. “He was small for a 13-year-old, but I had a 64-year-old back,” Cromer says, laughing. “I lifted him during rehearsals and maybe for a couple of shows, and then my old back said, Nuh-uh.”
Before COVID, the role was in fact played by a young actor, usually around 8 years old. Cromer laughs that his earliest Tims “have gone through college and are into their careers, married, and probably have beards.”
It’s a beautiful fall afternoon as we sit on the patio at the Wandering Griffin Brewery in Beavercreek. Cromer has a lot of stories, and, when he tells them, he often breaks into uproarious laughter—a bit like Scrooge when he gleefully realizes he hasn’t missed Christmas morning. He recalls, almost breathlessly, opening night of the 2019 run when stage lifts malfunctioned and actors were forced to pantomime their way through the entire script. “I laid on the floor instead of my bed,” he says, his eyes dancing as he recalls the spontaneity of the moment. “The Cratchits all kneeled and draped themselves over Martha for the scene where she hides under the kitchen table. We put folding chairs on the stage just so we could have some props, and the audience loved it.”
Or the time he decided he would shake up a scene by jumping off the foot of his bed, instead catching the sheets and spraining his ankle. He watched understudy Nick Rose’s two performances from the audience and loved it.
Two years ago, Cromer got a taste of what he’ll miss this holiday season. The pandemic halted all live performances in 2020, driving the play to an audio version on Cincinnati Public Radio with Cromer as a one-man show, basically reciting the story. He missed the instantaneous audience response, but he enjoyed doing various character voices, augmented by sound designer Matt Nielsen. “He added echoes, crackling fire, street noise,” Cromer says. “It was just remarkable.”
I’m getting the feeling that Cromer is already missing Scrooge. Maybe a little, Cromer concedes, especially the money. “A Christmas Carol would finance our entire Christmas,” he says, laughing. “But it was crazy. I’d be buying my gifts, getting them wrapped in my [Cincinnati] actor’s apartment, and grading papers while also trying to eat well, sleep, and be up late for the show.”
This holiday season will be more relaxing, he concedes. Which is good, because Cromer and his wife of 42 years, Carol, are about to become grandparents. Their son Charlie, who played Young Scrooge on the Playhouse stage with his father, and his wife are expecting their own “Tiny Tim” in early December, and Cromer is clearly happy he won’t be on stage when the blessed event comes.
I ask Cromer if he’ll have time to attend Mr. And Mrs. Fezziwig’s Holiday Party at The Phoenix, which is the Playhouse’s alternative holiday show this month. He ponders the question, noting it was at Fezziwig’s party where Young Scrooge met Belle and was at his happiest. He contrasts it with the searing scene later when Belle breaks their engagement, realizing Scrooge’s “master passion” had become money. As Cromer recounts the scene, he chokes up. “Just thinking about that moment,” he says, his voice slowly drifting off, “especially when I was watching Charlie do it…” He’s shaking his head and looking down sadly at his hands. For a moment, he’s channeling his inner Scrooge, watching helplessly as his younger self makes the biggest mistake of his life.
Where Scrooge is a gruff and unapproachable, Cromer is sentimental and worries that the Fezziwig party might unleash a tear or two. He was surprised at how emotional he got when his long-time dresser Cindy Saalfeld retired last summer, and he wonders if he’d feel the joy of the Fezziwigs’ bash.
Cromer visited a barber shop this fall for the first time in years, since he had no need to cultivate the wild, unkempt hair that added an extra ingredient of intimidation into Scrooge’s bark. He’s an occasional guest lecturer at Wright State and teaches stage combat and movement. He’s working on a book based on his acting career even though he isn’t finished with the stage. And he’s written a Moliere-inspired play in iambic pentameter that was performed online during the pandemic by his college students.
Cromer says he’s very interested in the next iteration of Ebenezer Scrooge, even though he’s retired from the role. Playhouse Producing Artistic Director Blake Robison is working on a new adaptation of Dickens’s story to debut in 2023 with the new theater. Cromer imagines Scrooge in his new digs, a packed audience watching every move intently and comparing it to the previous script and stage. The pressure is on, to be sure, but that’s what makes live performances so thrilling and often surprising. “I know I’m not going to do it anymore, but to go in and see a new version in a new space, that’s exciting,” he says. “I think the audience will love it.”
Until then, we must be content with the final joyous words of the last Christmas Carol in the Marx Theatre as they drift through the chilly winter sky: God bless us…everyone! That sentiment, thankfully, will never change.
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