A Christmas Carol: The Musical
I knew a couple of the songs from this because they were in an Alan Menken songbook that I bought I guess some time in the past couple of years, and I love absolutely everything I’ve ever seen or heard by him, so I knew I would at least be happy with the music here, and as music is often far more than 50% of a movie to me, there was a good chance I’d be head over heels with this one.
Bring in Kelsey Grammar doing a really great Scrooge, completely soused in the role, that kinda made me think he should’ve been Sweeney Todd in the new Tim Burton movie or at least at some point on stage (ah! Google tells me he did, in L.A., 1999) – he’s terrifically bitter and grouchy, something some of the adaptations I’ve seen really fail on, making him too much of a figure of fun; and his arc from that to finally opening his heart is more gradual than a sudden flinging open of the window on Christmas morning … of course I feel compelled to add at this point, I’ve never read the book, or I don’t remember reading it if I have, so I’m really going by my idea of what Scrooge should be than what Dickens might’ve intended. Then Jane Krakowski in a couple of parts, her main role of the Ghost of Christmas Past seriously vying for sexiest Scrooge ghost against Carol Kane in Scrooged, lol (okay, Kane was more kinky than sexy but still …) ... in fact, she kinda turns me on in the lamp-lighter outfit too 
Then there’s Geraldine Chaplin, Jennifer Love Hewitt (amazing, amazing, amazing), Jesse L. Martin (sooooo different from his part in Rent) and production values far better than you’d expect for a TV movie, and you’d think this couldn’t go wrong.
Alas, for all I loved about it, it’s never quite as good as it ought to be with the sum of its parts, though it comes pretty damn close. I think ultimately it comes down to the same problem I had with Christmas Carol: The Movie – that this story has been told so many times, and like so many of the tellings, this one really just feels too often like it’s going through the motions, albeit very slickly. But considering it’s so hard to find an adaptation that doesn’t feel that way (actually, I just remembered, one I forgot to mention when reviewing Christmas Carol: The Movie – and I might as well mention here or I’ll have to wait till next year – Bringing Out the Dead – which to me is the best of the lot even though most don’t even see it as having anything to do with Dickens, lol … I’ll admit the connection’s shaky …), this is still certainly one of the best.
One thing I’ve definitely decided, and that’s that any version of this story needs music – you just can’t believably do the transformation of this man from grinch to paragon of festivity without it, and that final reprise of “God Bless Us Everyone” here, starting with the young girl, and the song that leads into it in the graveyard truly captured that change for me better than any joyous 11th hour flinging open of the window and dancing a jig in the middle of the street.