Christine Baranski returns to narrate a fresh, English-language rendition of A Christmas Carol, while the project gears up to film season 4 of The Gilded Age.
NEW YORK — Christine Baranski, an Emmy- and Tony-winning performer, enjoyed a chance encounter about three years ago in Bedford, New York, near St. Matthew’s Church. She met Matthew Guard, the artistic director of the Skylark Vocal Ensemble, who, at the time, was outside the church playground. Their conversation began with a shared love for choral music, and Baranski soon became a devoted attendee at Guard’s concerts.
“I’m a fan,” she recalled, and they mused about collaborating. That idea blossomed into a narrated, musical adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Last December, Baranski appeared at The Morgan Library & Museum in New York, which houses the manuscript of the 1843 classic, to perform the piece. A recording followed in June at the Church of the Redeemer in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, and it was released on December 4 via the LSO Live label.
Baranski is slated to reprise the role on the Morgan stage this Thursday, with the Skylark Ensemble. The Morgan is currently exhibiting the original manuscript through January 11, and the production will also be staged the next night at The Breakers in Newport, Rhode Island. There, Baranski will again inhabit the character of Agnes van Rhijn as season four of HBO’s The Gilded Age begins filming on February 23.
“I have a strong commitment to keeping language vibrant,” Baranski explained. “Beautiful, well-crafted prose matters—Dickens, Stoppard, Shakespeare. Too often we grow lazy with our English.” She also offered praise for Julian Fellowes, the creator of The Gilded Age and Downton Abbey, suggesting he would likely enjoy playing Agnes because of her sharp wit.
Baranski draws on the same acting range that earned her an Emmy for Cybill and Tonys for The Real Thing and Rumors. “This project lets me bring to life a spectrum of characters, including Ebenezer, with subtlety and nuance. It’s a wonderful acting challenge—one that only a handful of performers have pursued, and I get to do it alongside a chorus.”
Guard’s arrangement merges Benedict Sheehan’s choral underscoring with Baranski’s narration and includes ten carols such as Silent Night, Deck the Halls, and Auld Lang Syne. Guard notes that reciting the entire Dickens tale would run far too long for a concert, so they trimmed the manuscript from roughly 30,000 words to about 5,000 to fit the performance format, allowing space for musical interludes that function like arias in an opera.
Sheehan, who previously collaborated with Guard on the 2020 project Once Upon a Time, contributed the orchestral stitching that binds the choral pieces to Baranski’s narration. The duo behind the music and narration continues to explore how to weave story and song into a cohesive experience.
Baranski has recently expanded her narration repertoire, substituting for Liev Schreiber with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in Beethoven’s Egmont in 2023. This experience reinforced her interest in performing in concert halls surrounded by exceptional musicians. To prepare for her 19th-century voice, she worked with dialect coach Howard Samuelson, and practiced via Zoom to avoid cliché and achieve a period-appropriate delivery. In her view, the Ghost of Christmas Past should sound ethereal and otherworldly, a voice that lingers beyond the stage.
Although she did not join in on the carols herself, Baranski felt the ensemble’s mood could influence her own interpretation. Guard described the process as an energizing give-and-take between performer and chorus, with neither always clearly in control.
Looking ahead, Baranski hopes this project will become a recurring Morgan event, potentially filmed there again and cherished as a yearly tradition akin to Handel’s Messiah or The Nutcracker. She even plans to present the recording as a gift to her grandchildren, four boys aged between 2 and 12. Her other well-known holiday role was as Martha May Whovier in the 2000 film How the Grinch Stole Christmas, a fact she notes evokes amused reactions from her grandchildren, who still see her as simply grandma.
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