Where to see A Christmas Carol in NYC in 2022

This splendid solo performance of Charles Dickens's holiday classic is the most theatrically fulfilling version I've ever seen. As directed by Michael Arden and designed by Dane Laffrey, the show never feels static: It surprises you at every turn, marshaling stage magic old and new to create a feast of spectacle. And the shining star at the top of the tree is the superb Jefferson Mays, who plays the narrator, Scrooge, the ghosts and dozens of others.—Adam Feldman

Playwright-director Mark Shanahan has come up with a relatively novel spin on A Christmas Carol: a mash-up of Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Long after Ebenezer's ghost-induced epiphany, the title detective (Drew McVety) is engaged to solve his murder. Shanahan's wreathing of these icons is fun—a haunted Holmes is visited by the specter of Scrooge—though it never really transcends its inspirations. The show returns for a second season in 2022 with Allen Gilmore as Ebenezer but the rest of the original cast intact.—Raven Snook 

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.”

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 annual spirited version of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. 

Queens' 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, leads the cast as Scrooge.