STAGE REVIEW : ‘A Child’s Christmas’ Revisited

Any Christmas show that recounts how Thomas Bowdler took the racy passages out of Shakespeare (thus the word bowdlerized ) is not your usual Christmas show.

It is a characteristic detail in Jeremy Brooks’ and Adrian Mitchell’s two-act adaptation of the Dylan Thomas poem, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” at the Grove Theatre Company’s Gem Theatre in Garden Grove through Dec. 24. The play is as much about Wales as it is about Christmas, and Bowdler is immortalized in “Swansea Heroes,” a second act song about Thomas’ hometown.

This is Thomas’ memory of a typical Christmas at home with his parents and relatives and chums singing and playing and regaling each other, and it’s the process of selective memory that is the play’s most charming element. Dylan doesn’t recall much of what anyone else got for Christmas, for instance, but the moment he gets his shiny red BSA bike, time stands still.

Director Daniel Bryan Cartmell’s third annual production manages its most theatrical effects when time shifts to and fro, with the adult Dylan (Gary Bell, in fine voice) warmly reciting his text, and then Bell shifting character to Dylan’s father, telling Young Dylan (a spunky Danny Oberbeck) about his own fantastical childhood. “It was before the wheel,” the father tells the son, “and we lived in caves.”

We can see in this scene what made the writer: Thomas himself would avoid the tall tale and narrate with a sense of poetic realism. The Christmas party and the Swansea adventures with the boys (Steve Neuder, Bud Leslie and Rick Tigert) and feisty girl cousins (Kelli Evans and Nina Herman) go on at their own pace--life’s, more than theater’s. The scenes, and the play, seem too long; but trimming them might dilute the sense of the full, luxurious length of a great boyhood day.

Underneath the anecdotal, episodic structure lies a subconscious thread that ties us to Thomas’ memory piece: Our own childhood, and how it was marked off by a series of Christmases.

The other strength here is the singing, led by Leisa Jo Waller as an aunt that Thomas likely remembers as more beautiful than she really was. The many unfamiliar carols and tunes carry a sardonic, Celtic edge to them, removed from our often saccharin American style. Cartmell, though, should do some quality-control on the other foreign touch--the dialects, which sometimes slip into Irish.

At 12852 Main St., Garden Grove, Wednesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Dec. 4 and 18, 3 p.m.; Dec. 4, 11 and 18, 7:30 p.m., until Dec. 24. Tickets: $13-$17; (714) 636-7213.