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STAGE REVIEW

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Dylan Thomas’ “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” is not a Yule postcard, dripping with sentiment. It’s a poet’s vivid evocation of a jubilant boyhood Christmas day spent with his large family in Swansea, South Wales. But you would reap many more rewards if you read the story this season rather than endure Troupe America’s touring production.

This bus-and-truck company from Minneapolis is faithful to the story but not to its spirit. Christmas here leaves you logy, as in too much turkey. The 15 actors and the handful of props--a hearth, a huge Christmas tree, a piano, a bar--get lost on a cavernous stage.

Maybe the story’s lure is more apparent at other theaters. But Beckman Auditorium at Caltech, where the show was seen Saturday, is not a dramatic venue. It’s an orchestral and concert stage. A feast like “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” gets swallowed up there, nullifying its ebullience.

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From the outset the production seemed chilly, and it only recovered near the end when the actors playing Dylan’s family, his chums and colorful relatives, captured for a warm moment your own cheeriest Christmas memories.

Thomas’ literary achievement is a Puckish menu of language and imagery embracing a morning’s frolic in the snow, the unwrapping of presents and the gathering of the clan and the family dinner. Everyone is indeed a character.

The story’s language is painterly, suggesting those vibrant Christmas scenes with the family racing through the vast decorated house in Ingmar Bergman’s “Fanny and Alexander.”

But proceedings at Beckman had the sluggish pace of real life--that meant lots of dead spaces and pauses that deflated the work’s buoyancy. Also some of the accents and the diction were not clear.

Troupe America, for the most part, did catch the flavor of the 1920s. The singing was fetching, and the actors playing the Dylan roles were convincing (Bernard Marks as the older Dylan looking back on his childhood and Larry Dean Birkett as young Dylan). But too many grinches stole Noel. Even the vaulting tree seemed bare of ornaments, and Dylan’s dearly longed-for new red bike was, of all things, a contemporary model.

Plays Saturday, 8 p.m., at Plummer Auditorium, 201 E. Chapman Ave., Fullerton. Tickets: $12.50-$17.50 (714) 773-3371. Also Sunday, 7 p.m., at Marsee Auditorium, El Camino College, 16007 Crenshaw Blvd., Torrance. Tickets: $15-$22; (213) 329-5345.

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