A Christmas Carol

About This Event

Goodman Theatre's A Christmas Carol is as much a Chicago holiday fixture as the tree at Daley Plaza — a full stage production of the Dickens classic running nearly seven weeks every winter inside the Albert Theatre, tucked into the old Reid Murdoch building downtown. Tickets start at $25, genuinely affordable for a production this well-drilled, with sensory-friendly performances built into the run.

It started as a practical fix, not a grand tradition in the making. In 1978, Goodman general manager Roche Schulfer and artistic director Gregory Mosher needed a way to pull in audiences during the theater's traditionally slow holiday stretch, so they mounted a stage adaptation of A Christmas Carol at the Goodman's old home inside the Art Institute, with Chicago actor William J. Norris as Scrooge. It worked well enough to come back the next year, and it's run every winter since — Norris alone played Scrooge for 11 seasons, longer than anyone since. Across its now-decades-long run, the show has been seen by close to 1.5 million people.

Worth knowing before you go: there's no single showtime listed here because there isn't one — like any theater run, it plays on a rotating schedule of specific dates and times across its seven-week window, so check the Goodman's own ticket page for the exact performance you want rather than assuming you can just show up during the run.