Video: Get a Behind the Scenes Look at A CHRISTMAS CAROL With the Creative Team

A Christmas Carol is basically a 90-minute magic trick

All elements came together in order to tell Scrooge's dark night of the soul seamlessly

What we're going to look at here is one small transition in the play, where Scrooge makes

his way from his counting house to his bedroom. Seemingly innocuous, but incredibly complex

Here we are with Jefferson as he plays Scrooge, who is locking up his counting house

He makes his exit, and as soon as he closes the door, everything begins to shift

As Scrooge leaves his counting house, the wallpaper which had been surrounding the door

fades away. We transition from an interior to an exterior seamlessly without changing the position of

any scenery. It's all about lighting and projection. We amplify his voice to change the room and the location that he's in

So when he's in the counting house versus the streets versus his bedroom, we change

the environment around him and the reflections in the theater itself so that it helps us

understand location. Dickens talks a lot about light, but mostly he talks about the absence of light

So he's talking about these foggy, dark corners, fog coming in under the door, just a candle

in the corner, things are dismal, things are dark. And this is the moment that the turntable moves for the first time, revealing to the

audience that we're not quite in a static space. The use of shadow was really important too in Ben's lighting

As you can see, Scrooge's shadow is sort of a character that he plays with

One of the things we tried with the lighting design in this section was the use of moving footlights

And it was a really effective way of lighting Jefferson without lighting the floor. And we could track him from space to space, revealing as little as possible of the scenery

As Jefferson describes the knocker, we start building resonance within the room

We start anticipating fear. We do that by using subsonic frequencies throughout the room to build anxiety and build

fear underneath Jefferson's narration. This continues to build until it climaxes in the moment where lights, sound, video

and scenic all work together to create one jump scare moment. Marley's knocker was one of my favorite moments in the show

I think Dickens describes it as an abysmal light. And we had to decide how to create that using Jefferson's face instead of the knocker

We came up with an innovation of hiding a light in Jefferson's hat so that we could

refocus Jefferson's face for this moment. As he moves downstage, the walls and door begin to move into a new position

We really wanted the space to be as unreliable and as shape-shifting as possible

Jefferson transforms back into the narrator on the city streets. Lights, projections, sound all slowly fade to the scene that we had seen previously

So what's happening now backstage begins a complicated ballet. A large staircase has been brought in by the crew and is placed on its spikes on the turntable

At this moment, if you were in the audience, you'd have no idea that anything is moving

that a wall opened, let alone that this enormous scenic piece is slowly gliding on stage

We wanted the audience to notice things as Scrooge would have in the moment

Now, of course, as you can see on stage, Jefferson is moving through basically complete darkness

so that we cannot see the staircase coming on. But as is visible in the infrared here, the staircase is coming all the way downstage

and into position as Jefferson is also maneuvering over a moving turntable under his feet

It's one of the most magical moments in the piece where Jefferson turns around with a lit candle

and all of a sudden, for the first time, we realize that there's a giant staircase there and we hadn't even seen it come in

Backstage, a unit that contains a crash pad for Jefferson is tracked into place

and in the stage right wing, a small staircase bringing his double into position

also moves in. And as he begins to climb and the turntable rotates, sliding walls open again

and begin to bring on a piece of furniture for Scrooge's room

Each time the turntable moves, that happens. And we've lit Jefferson just so that you don't see him escape and jump off

and our double, Danny, steps into the shaft of light. As we restored to normalcy, we think that we see Jefferson on the staircase continuing to climb

And this is sort of the trickiest moment where he walks up the stairs

and does a quick pass off of this lit candle you can see here in camera three

to Jefferson just in time to open the door. Meanwhile, Dickens' beautiful language has never stopped

Walk through his rooms to see that all was right. He enters his room and it begins to assemble around him

And we thought getting back into our apartments in New York City was hard

What makes the design for A Christmas Carol so complex is a lot about what you don't see

It's mysterious and dark. It's magical. It's a shapeshifter. It's unreliable. We hope that the audience can't tell where his work ends and mine begins

We always knew that we wanted to create focus for the show. We wanted to keep that focus on Jefferson and the storyline that was being told

Sound, informed lighting, informed projection, informed scenery, all of which were in service of Jefferson's fabulous performance

We all wanted to make sure that our designs supported Jefferson, that our designs supported the storytelling

and that while we wanted to create a spectacle, we wanted to create a ghost story and a theatrical event that hadn't been seen before