‘A Child’s Christmas’ Gets New Wrapping at the Gem : Stage: New director dramatically changes staging for the classic that opens its fourth straight holiday run in Garden Grove tonight.

Some stage perennials of the Christmas season have become so hoary with age that you can hear them getting creakier by the year. Nobody complains out loud, of course. That would be like telling Santa Claus his beard is too long. But you think to yourself, “Why don’t they surprise us for a change?”

Well, that is precisely what director Thomas F. Bradac has decided to do with his staging of Dylan Thomas’ “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” which opens tonight at the Gem Theatre and runs through Dec. 24. Although the holiday production is only three years old--barely enough time for it to grow chin stubble, let alone a beard--Bradac says he has overhauled the show from set to concept.

“I’ve basically built on what we had, but I’ve taken a different direction,” he said earlier this week. “For one thing, I scrapped the Welsh pub. We’d been using a turntable contraption with a pub on one side and a house on the other. It was difficult to put in, and I didn’t find it aesthetically satisfying.”

For another thing, Bradac opted to go “straight to the poetry.” He says he will emphasize “the memory play” chiefly through the language of the narration without the establishing device of the pub atmosphere, while focusing on “the child’s fantasy” through an assemblage of outsize props.

“I want to do something simpler and cleaner than previous productions,” Bradac said, “and, I hope, as effective.”

This is an easy thing to say but not so easy to do. “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” has been the Gem’s biggest box-office hit for each of the past three years that Daniel Bryant Cartmell directed it. No show has even come close in popularity, with the exception of last season’s musical revue, “Tomfoolery.”

As any pollster will tell you, most people don’t like radical change. You tamper with a tradition--however young--at your own risk. Bradac knows that. He also knows that the trove of Welsh lore, highlighted by the choral arrangements that Cartmell had developed for previous productions, has been among the most appealing qualities of “A Child’s Christmas.”

“That is his legacy,” said Bradac, and the Welsh songs remain, as do the customs and the anecdotes and the rich ethnic flavor that Cartmell had amalgamated into the script.

Seven players from last year’s production also are back in the principal roles, which ought to lend a certain familiarity, with nine new supporting players.

Most of all, though, playgoers can count on the return of Dylan Thomas’ poetically grand reminiscence of the holiday season, as adapted for the stage by Jeremy Brooks and Adrian Mitchell.

In his tale of a Swansea childhood, Thomas wrote: “One Christmas was so much like another I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was 12 or . . . 12 days and 12 nights when I was 6.”

Where he grew up, “all the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find.”

In they go, “into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea,” and out come drowsy uncles and bustling aunts; red-nosed postmen with blue knuckles; the useful and the useless gifts, the latter much preferred; snowball fights and ghost stories; and the sound of church bells from the “bat-black, snow-white belfries” bringing tidings from “bishops and storks” over “the frozen foam of the powder and ice-cream hills.”

Is it the children in the audience or their parents who have enjoyed past productions more? A perplexing question apparently.

“I’m not sure,” Bradac said. “I think kids have a lot of fun, but their parents get a bigger kick out of it. We had one grateful gentleman come by one night and tell us he forgot what people did on holidays before television--until this show reminded him.”

In the meantime, Bradac hasn’t forgotten the inveterate pub-lovers. He is reviving a post-performance tradition of free Welsh-style entertainment in the theater’s upstairs lounge on Friday and Saturday nights during the show’s four-week run. Actors from the play will sing songs, read poetry and recite stories.

“It’s a trade-off,” Bradac says. “I hope it works.”

“A Child’s Christmas in Wales” opens tonight at the Gem Theatre, 12852 Main St., Garden Grove, and continues through Dec. 24, with seven performances per week: Wednesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m.; Sundays at 7:30; matinees on Saturday and Sunday at 3. Tickets: $16 to $20. Some performances will feature preshow carolers. Information: (714) 636-7213.