A CHRISTMAS CAROL

You may still attend your local theater company’s production of A Christmas Carol and catch your favorite version on television, but a holiday celebration can no longer be considered complete without a good listen to Patrick Stewart’s audio performance of Dickens’s Christmas classic. You get here what you won’t get anywhere else: each word of Dickens’s remarkable narrative rendered with mesmerizing skill by Stewart. (This leading actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company is best known as Captain Jean-Luc Picard on television’s “Star Trek: The Next Generation”-- a fact which can be used to help entice young revelers to give this version a try.) The experience offered by Dickens and Stewart is so fresh, so rich, so detailed, and so heartfelt, that new traditions will need to be developed: put another log on the fire, gather round the family stereo. This is storytelling at its pure, simple, powerful best. C.T. ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine [Published: AUG 93]