I Like New York in Yule

Why is New York the most hated city in America? Partly because it is so very old, with all the ailments that attend decrepitude. The town is seen as a doddering, muttering, pest-ridden bag lady. New York can hardly remember the glory days when it was an empress, exquisite in its elegance and clout. In that gilded time, Manhattan was also the world’s show-biz Mecca, a glamour magnet of theater, department stores and cafe society. Today those species are endangered or extinct.

Once a year, though, like a princess who has been sleeping in rags, the town stirs itself to recall its grand traditions.The grimace crinkles into a smile, the Grinch is transformed into Santa Claus — and the rest of the country pays homage. For New York is Christmas Central. Manhattan owns this glitziest and most sentimental of seasons, beginning with Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade and culminating in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

Outsiders want in; they fill midtown’s hotels and clot its traffic. Secular pilgrims, they trek to the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center (and to its sibs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in Trump Tower and at Lincoln Center). They see a holiday show: the Radio City Christmas Spectacular, which will attract a million patrons this year at $25 to $55 a ticket, or another family entertainment (the Big Apple Circus, Shari Lewis’ Lamb Chop on Broadway). And they window-shop on Fifth Avenue — a promenade that remains the city’s most bustling theatrical experience.

In its totality, the visit is a time trip to a prettier New York and a sweeter America. “When I was little, I used to come with my grandmother,” says Nancy Murray of Scotch Plains, New Jersey, of her annual trip to Radio City. “I loved it; the show always gave me the Christmas spirit. It still does. And when my son is old enough, I hope he will come with his grandmother.”

Every large city ties itself in a big red bow each Christmas, but no place gets with the holiday program in quite the way New York does. Across from the Rockefeller Center tree, Saks Fifth Avenue tells the Yuletide tale of plucky Art Aimesworth vs. the Dark Elves in six sprightly windows (with narration by Cindy Crawford, Peter Duchin, Brooke Shields, Dominick Dunne, Martha Stewart and seven others). At Fendi the Christmas trees are as svelte and haughty as the Euro-mannequins. From the windows of the Warner Bros. Studio Store, a behemoth Bugs and three of his Looney Tunes pals gaze fretfully across 57th Street at the Tiffany’s display — cuddly bears in tuxedos, snow gear and seraphim wings.

Virtually the only Fifth Avenue building without even a sprig of festoonery is Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. But then Christmas in New York, as in most American cities, is less a religious feast than a mercantile festival, whose motto could be “Buy now, pray later.” Many retailers rely on this season for fully half their sales and profits. Similarly, performing-arts organizations use holiday chestnuts like Amahl and the Night Visitors and Handel’s Messiah as surefire crowd lures. The New York City Ballet’s production of George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker plays to more than 100,000 people each Christmas and earns the company a fat $5.6 million. For regional theaters, A Christmas Carol is an even bigger cash cow. “It pays the bills for the rest of the season,” says Lawrence Harbison of Samuel French Inc., the premier play- licensing house. The adaptation of Dickens’ 1843 cautionary classic is by far the most widely produced play on the regional circuit.

It is also, this month, a Broadway-style quadruple whammy. This week brings A Tuna Christmas (a sequel to the long-running Texas jape Greater Tuna), featuring a disaster-prone production of the Dickens story. In two weeks Patrick Stewart shucks his Star Trek: Generations uniform for the dark garb of Ebenezer Scrooge to give 21 dramatic readings of A Christmas Carol. This is Stewart’s third New York Christmas in four years, and each time his show has sold out, leading to successively larger venues. This year he will fill the 1,400-seat Richard Rodgers Theatre at $40 and $50 a ticket. Thus does Captain Picard of the 24th century reach back to the 19th — for one man who made a profitable career of reading A Christmas Carol onstage, in both England and the U.S., was Dickens himself.

It has been said that with that little book, Dickens invented Christmas — the holiday as we know it, with lavish presents and greeting cards, with liberal sentiment and family gatherings, and with the spirit of generosity helping to stanch the guilty suspicion that we hadn’t been charitable enough on the other 364 days. Shopkeepers and toymakers can thank Dickens; put-upon parents can blame him, though the commercial excesses perpetrated in the name of Christmas were the last thing this radical social reformer had in mind.

A little of Dickens’ furious humanism surfaces in the most lavish Christmas Carol on display this month in New York. This is the $12 million musical version playing at Madison Square Garden’s Paramount theater with its 5,200 seats. The huge stage is dense with the crippled, the homeless, the starving — and, in this morass of need, one man, Scrooge (Walter Charles), railing against those who would help them. “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?” Add an “Are there no orphanages?” and you have the agenda of the next Speaker of the House.

As it happens, one model for this Scrooge was not Newt Gingrich but Charles Dickens. “He was a very generous man,” says Mike Ockrent, the show’s director and co-author, “but I think he viewed himself as a potential Scrooge — what he might have become had his attitude been different.” This Christmas Carol grafts part of Dickens’ biography (his days as a child laborer, his father’s trip to debtors’ prison) onto Scrooge. It makes him less a villain than a victim of his times. “Scrooge is really every one of us,” notes the show’s composer, Alan Menken. “We all have a tendency to watch out for our interests and to avoid taking responsibility for the fate of the world.”

The more obvious message of the new Carol is that it’s big and pretty — holiday candy for the whole family at $19 to $55 a ticket. It was confected by Broadway’s top talent, including set designer Tony Walton, costume designer William Ivey Long, choreographer Susan Stroman and lyricist Lynn Ahrens. Some are working at half speed. Menken’s melodies are less inventive than his scores for the Disney cartoons The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. He gets a B+ for hummable ballads and ho-humbuggable comic turns. Stroman’s jazziest ideas are reprises of her dancing-on-furniture number from Crazy for You. Ahrens’ lyrics are wan, snapless. It takes a while for the 90-min. show to become more than the sum of its parts.

But what parts! Walton attached rows of Victorian houses to both ends of the Paramount stage (already double the width of the standard Broadway stage) so that it seems to embrace the audience. And everywhere there is wonder to behold: Jacob Marley’s huge skull glowering on the facade of Scrooge’s house, sets that open and fold like mammoth pop-up Christmas cards, a spider web of gold chains on which Scrooge is crucified by remorseful ghosts, a tombstone that forces him into the rising fires of hell.

Ockrent loved the Christmas pantomimes of his English youth, with their | gaudy costumes and giddy parody. “We have to introduce kids to the theater,” he says, “so their imaginations are stimulated intellectually and visually.” In his Christmas Carol, children will find plenty to keep them beguiled: high- stepping oranges and pears, the flight of Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Future above the audience, a bountiful snowfall on the expensive seats and, at the end, Christmas trinkets distributed by the cast to lucky theatergoers.

The show is playing 85 times through Jan. 1, with as many as four shows a day. Even so, with a cast of 90 and devilishly elaborate special effects, this very Menken Christmas Carol won’t break even for a few years. The producers hope to make it a holiday tradition in New York and other cities. “It’s a story that has lasted 150 years,” says Ockrent, “and I don’t see why it shouldn’t last another 150. Hopefully at the Paramount.”

Well, he could hope that A Christmas Carol lasts as long as the Radio City holiday show, which has been going since 1933 and never looked better. Under the direction of Robert Longbottom (Pageant), the show struts the ageless panache of the 36 Rockettes in five precision prances, notably as a parade of wooden soldiers and as Raggedy Anns whose letter blocks eventually spell out merry christmas and a happy new year. A new version of The Nutcracker, with teddy bear dancers as sugar plum fairies, Arabian houris and Chinese pandas, is delicate, funny, winning. The climactic Nativity tableau — teeming with camels, sheep, donkeys and some robust piety — is bold enough to remind the audience who the real star of Christmas is. And, yes, there’s a brisk, fanciful version of the Scrooge story — in 12 minutes!

In its finesse and sweep, the Radio City spectacle summons up more than the best spirit of Christmas past. It creates a vision of old New York, when any young couple could think themselves as suave as Fred and Ginger on the ballroom floor or two skaters in love on the Rockefeller Center ice rink. Perhaps this image is no closer to reality than the current dark dream of Manhattan as Hell on the Hudson, but it tickles the mind nonetheless. Emerging from the show, locals and visitors alike can think, for a New York minute, that this is the capital of Christmas.