Christmas Carol 2025: Ticket price, how to watch, where to watch

'A Christmas Carol' will be available at Summoners Ensemble Theater in New York City and the Alley Theater in Houston. In New York, an immersive production of the holiday classic from London's Old Vic offers storytelling and song-singing to audiences at the Perelman Performing Arts Center. And the annual, intimate staging returns at the Merchant's House Museum, which is available for streaming. Transport to the 19th century via the house's parlor room, decked out in period furnishings and candlelight, where John Kevin Jones stars as Mr. Dickens. A $25 ticket includes unlimited views through January 1.

Or catch Houston's venerated repertory resident theater, the Alley -- which has hosted premieres from the likes of Rajiv Joseph, Tony Kushner and Lawrence Wright -- streaming its own live version of the Dickensian story of redemption, replete with elaborate Victorian sets and costumes. A $39 ticket includes 24-hour replay; performances only on December 19 and 20.

Holiday classics like "A Christmas Carol," "It's a Wonderful Life" and "Amahl and the Night Visitors" -- all getting outings on Manhattan stages this season -- are durable by nature. As with any beloved work of art, their meaning can alter for individuals over time, and deepen with repetition. They can also land differently depending on who's interpreting them, and how.


As introductions to the tale of Ebenezer Scrooge go, though, that one eventually worked out well. In the Old Vic production of "A Christmas Carol," which went to Broadway in 2019, Christopher Nightingale's Tony Award-winning score is the most ethereal and transporting element, comfortingly familiar, exalting and nostalgic all at once.

Currently running a stone's throw from Wall Street at the Perelman Performing Arts Center, where the ensemble of actors plays some of the music on handbells, the Jack Thorne adaptation is a distinctive take on Dickens' original. Yet the retelling, conceived and directed by Matthew Warchus, is in keeping with Dickens' social message that hardhearted greed is bad, and kindly selflessness is the way to go.

It sounds so charming: Benedict Nightingale, the esteemed London theater critic, trying to make a Christmas Eve tradition of reading Charles Dickens' ghostly novella "A Christmas Carol" to his small children by the fire. The only trouble being, his son Christopher said, that the tradition, several decades ago, didn't catch on.