The Old Vic’s production of A Christmas Carol, written for the theatre by Jack Thorne and conceived and directed by its artistic director Matthew Warchus, returns to New York in November, with Olivier Award winner Andy Karl playing Ebenezer Scrooge.
The production of A Christmas Carol that has become a December fixture at the Old Vic Theatre is to cross the Atlantic once again this winter. It returns to the Perelman Performing Arts Center in Lower Manhattan from Friday 20 November 2026 to Sunday 3 January 2027, and the actor who will carry it is one London has watched at close quarters: Andy Karl takes the part of Ebenezer Scrooge.
What travels is the Old Vic’s own show rather than the title alone. The version of Charles Dickens’s story is Jack Thorne’s, written for the theatre, and it was conceived and directed by Matthew Warchus, the Old Vic’s artistic director. The staging places the audience around and among the action, and it won five Tony Awards when it was seen on Broadway.
Neither name is a stranger to the West End. Warchus also directed Matilda The Musical, and Thorne wrote Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Both hold Tony Awards of their own.
Andy Karl is a three-time Tony Award nominee and an Olivier Award winner, and his association with the Waterloo Road theatre is a long one: he played Phil Connors in Groundhog Day at the Old Vic, on Broadway, in the Old Vic revival and in Australia. His other parts include Rocky Balboa in Rocky, Bruce Granit in On the Twentieth Century and Edward Lewis in Pretty Woman The Musical. New York audiences know him from television as well, most widely as Sgt Mike Dodds in Law & Order: SVU.
The engagement is his first on the Perelman’s main stage. He had appeared at the centre once before, in a sold-out concert mounted during its opening season.
Readers in London should not confuse the two engagements. The New York run is a separate mounting of the same production, presented by the Perelman Performing Arts Center; the Old Vic stages its own, with its own company, at home. The London production of A Christmas Carol at the Old Vic opens on Thursday 12 November 2026 and is booking until Saturday 9 January 2027, with tickets from £29 and a running time of two hours including the interval.
The American return has been underwritten by Kenneth C. Griffin, the founder of Citadel, through his civic engagement initiative Griffin Catalyst. The Perelman Performing Arts Center opened in September 2023 as the last element of the rebuilt World Trade Center site, and is led by artistic director Bill Rauch and executive director Khady Kamara Nunez. It is the fourth season the building has programmed, and A Christmas Carol has become one of its annual fixtures in the same way it has at Waterloo.
