Even the Muppets knew not to mess with A Christmas Carol. When their (perfect) adaptation was well past its twentieth birthday, director Brian Henson looked back on what had originally been envisioned as a “romping parody”: “Then we stopped and reconsidered,” he said. The screenwriter Jerry Juhl put it this way : “Rather than let the Muppets ride roughshod over Dickens, I went back to the novel and decided it would be rotten of us to belittle the quality of one of the greatest stories of all time.” Although the playwright Jack Thorne — in his adaptation that’s been running annually at the Old Vic since 2017 and paid a previous visit to New York in 2019 — hasn’t exactly belittled Dickens’s immortal “ghost story of Christmas,” he has assuredly made it smaller. The director Matthew Wa

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