Kelsey Grammer may be playing Ebenezer Scrooge, but that doesn't mean he's anything like the heartless man the character starts out as in "A Christmas Carol: The Musical."
"It was almost impossible for me to get through a take without crying myself. . . . I was a mess through half the production," Grammer said in a telephone interview with TV critics. "The guy suffers a lot. You don't realize until you get to play Scrooge how much damage he has sustained and how much he has survived. He was a man doing his best and he lost his way."
Grammer and NBC have found what promises to be an evergreen TV special in this adaptation of the long-running Madison Square Garden stage production. With music by Oscar and Grammy-winning composer Alan Menken, lyrics from Tony winner Lynn Ahrens ("Ragtime," "Anastasia"), a cast that includes Jason Alexander ("Listen Up"), Jesse L. Martin ("Law & Order"), Jane Krakowski ("Ally McBeal"), Jennifer Love Hewitt ("Party of Five") and Geraldine Chaplin, as well as amazing production values, "A Christmas Carol: The Musical" (Sunday, 8 p.m., Ch. 5) is an utter delight.
Not that Grammer leaped at the chance to film the musical for a TV movie. "NBC has actually been saying to me for the last three or four years that they had this musical project that was in Madison Square Garden that they wanted me to do," Grammer said. "And I was like, 'Oh, I can't do that.' "
But when another project he was working on for the network fell through, he finally succumbed to entreaties that he consider "A Christmas Carol." "I finally did (see it), and I thought, 'You know what? It's time for me to play Scrooge.' "
But re-creating a role that has been done so many times in so many different ways did prove to be a bit of challenge for the former "Frasier" star. "The truth is, everybody knows where this story is going. It's a little bit like playing Frasier that way," Grammer said. "Because we became so familiar, everybody knew where our show was going to go. The fun of watching it was seeing how we got there.
"And that's, I think, what's different in this tale. It's a little bit bigger in some ways because it's got the open streets, and it's got the musical value. It's a little bit more celebratory, I guess. It's a little bit more sort of Christmasy, you might say."
There's emotional resonance under the musical score and production numbers. "In playing it, I discovered something extraordinary," Grammer said. "That Tiny Tim character represents . . . all the hopes of childhood. And it was Scrooge's childhood that was robbed from him. I think it is our childhoods for which we mourn as we grow older — the dreams that didn't pay off. And when you see that death in the vision that he sees of the little boy being buried, all that is in him that has been killed through the years — through choices of greed and avarice — finally cry out in him to the God of his childhood. And it redeems him."
While Grammer doesn't fancy himself a musical-comedy star, he acquits himself well in the role. And it's obvious that he had "a (heck) of a lot of fun" making the movie. "The American musical is unique to American culture. . . . I do think what is normally a very dark story to tell, by putting it into the American musical format, it makes it a little bit more watchable — a little bit more of a celebration."
E-mail: pierce@desnews.com