The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain

Redlaw is a bitter chemistry professor who remembers every wound ever done to him with perfect and corrosive clarity. When a ghost offers him the chance to forget all his grief, he takes it, and discovers too late that the absence of painful memory carries with it the loss of compassion and empathy. Dickens' last Christmas book uses the supernatural apparatus of his earlier holiday tales to make an argument about the necessity of sorrow to a fully human life, with the humble Milly Swidger representing the kind of uncomplicated goodness that no gift of forgetting can destroy.

Geoffrey Giuliano and The Icon Players bring theatrical energy to Dickens' text, giving the ensemble of characters their distinct voices and the story's moral argument its proper weight without making it feel like a sermon. The performance understands Dickens' blend of sentiment and social observation, letting the pathos land without tipping into sentimentality. At just over four hours, this is an ideal holiday listen.