Where to see A Christmas Carol in NYC in 2023

John Kevin Jones goes to the Dickens in this one-hour account of the novelist's classic holiday ghost story, adapted with director Rhonda Dodd. The Merchant's House Museum, formerly the home of a wealthy 19th-century family, provides an atmospheric candlelit setting for Jones's tenth annual engagement. Select performances include a preshow reception at which the audience sips mulled wine and Jones recites Clement Moore's “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”

This hour-long original musical adaptation of Dickens's yuletide fable, created by composer Michael Sgouros and librettist-director Brenda Bell, returns for its 15th year at the West Village's Players Theatre. The updated set is inspired by traditional British panto.

Local bump-and-grind impresario Johnny Porkpie reimagines Scrooge as a greedy strip-club owner named Ebeneza who rips off her dancers—and, of course, her clothes—in this risqué burlesque-theater adaptation of Charles Dickens's holiday chestnut. If you like your spiritual redemption stories perked up with pasties and tassels, this is the Carol for you. (But leave the kids at home for this one, folks.)

Novelist and comic-book auteur Neil Gaiman, the creative force behind The Sandman and American Gods, recounted Charles Dickens's supernatural Christmas novella in a celebrated 2013 reading at the New York Public Library. Now he dons a top hat and beard once more in a pair of shows at the Town Hall; writer and podcaster Molly Oldfield provides historical background to set the scene.

The British jack-of-all-theater-trades Guy Masterson, who directed the recent Broadway comedy The Shark Is Broken, specializes in multicharacter solo performances. Here, he plays all the roles in a one-man version of Charles Dickens's beloved novella in a holiday production adapted and directed by Nick Hennegan. 

The Secret Theatre, which had a near-death experience during the pandemic, decks the halls of its new Woodside venue with its version of Charles Dickens's haunted tale of a pinchpenny's redemption. Company founder Richard Mazda, who wrote the adaptation, also directs the show and leads the cast as Scrooge. 

Random Access Theatre’s boozy-geeky Drunk Texts series muddles classical texts—or modern ones reimagined as classical—into a cocktail of drinking games, improv and audience interaction, in which the audiences chooses which thespians take shots. Now the gang toasts the holiday season with its highly spirited annual version of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol.