Time for Tried and True : Theater: ‘Tis the season for annual holiday shows, those dependable moneymakers that both theaters and audiences like. A newcomer is being added to San Diego’s three yearly productions.

Theatrical producers must have dreams like this:

A dependable annual moneymaker of a show walks into their lives. People buy out the house year after year, without even waiting for the reviews. As the delighted crowds rush in, they bless you for giving them the opportunity to come in droves.

Sometimes such dreams come true. They are called annual holiday shows.

San Diego has three of them. The oldest is San Diego Repertory Theatre’s “A Christmas Carol,” which will hit its 15-year mark when it opens Thursday at the Lyceum Stage in Horton Plaza. Lamb’s Players Theatre’s “A Festival of Christmas,” in its 13th year, opens Nov. 30 at the Lamb’s Players Theatre in National City. “Black Nativity,” a Southeast Community Theatre production now in its third year, will open at the Educational Cultural Complex on Nov. 30.

Lamb’s will also introduce a new holiday show that artistic director Robert Smyth is hoping will become an annual event: “Dickens, Dining and Song.” The show, Kerry Cederberg Meads’ adaptation of “A Christmas Carol” for a cast of four, will include madrigals, Christmas carols and dinner, complete with flaming plum pudding. It will be held at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral on Dec. 16-23.

And that’s in addition to the shows that are coming to town just for this holiday season: “Babes in Toyland,” a production sponsored by the San Diego-based National Theater for Children at the Spreckels Theatre, Dec. 13-14; Ken Hill’s (not Andrew Lloyd Webber’s) “Phantom of the Opera,” at Copley Symphony Hall, Dec. 26-31; “Michael Feinstein in Concert: Piano and Voice” at the Civic Theatre, Dec. 26-31, and “The 1940s Radio Hour,” a show with some Christmas music set around the Christmas season, at the North Coast Repertory Theatre through Dec. 31.

Holiday shows are one thing. Annual holiday shows are quite another, both for the theaters that produce them and for the community that comes back to see them faithfully year after year. Annual productions tend to cost less than one-shot shows because the theater usually has the script and props on hand. Less effort is needed to sell the tickets because the show has a built-in demand. And the infusion of holiday spirit inevitably imparts good will between the theater and the community, bolstered by the well-meaning messages these plays generally tell.

To that end, the San Diego Rep has perhaps gone the furthest. In a project now in its third year, the company has even gone so far as to offer gifts to some of its less-privileged audience members. For a special night called Magic Christmas, Dec. 19, the company will erase the boundaries between art and life for disadvantaged children and their families when, after the free show, the actor playing Scrooge hands out presents to an audience.

The presents will come from San Diego Rep patrons, who are being asked to take unwrapped gifts to the show.

Walter Schoen, who will direct “A Christmas Carol” for the second year in a row, said he sought to heighten the relevance of Dickens’ story by staging it as a story of contemporary homeless people who discover the book and the story.

If “A Christmas Carol” gets people into the spirit of giving, theater officials can only hope that some of the spirit will spill over to the theater itself, which, as of late October, was desperately in need of about $250,000 to complete its season.

“There’s no doubt that ‘A Christmas Carol’ is a major revenue source,” said Adrian Stewart, managing director of the San Diego Rep. “It is the largest-selling show, and it is not part of the season ticket sales. We do very much rely on its success.”

Last year “A Christmas Carol” brought in $175,000 in ticket sales, Stewart said. He is counting on at least that much this year. Unfortunately, that money was budgeted and doesn’t count toward the $250,000 shortfall.

Robert Smyth, artistic director of Lamb’s Players Theatre, also finds its annual show “very important financially.”

Lamb’s “A Festival of Christmas” often uses a new script, as it does this year, so people buy tickets not knowing what they will see. All they know is that it will be about Christmas, will include a generous sampling of carols and inevitably will impart that elusive, warm and fuzzy holiday spirit.

With an annual income of about $90,000, “it probably brings in twice what any of the other shows bring in,” Smyth said. He described this year’s new show as the story of a group of amateur performers who win a spot on a television variety show.

“A lot of people will come to the theater in the Christmas season not knowing what the show is about, but knowing it’s a celebration. We don’t have to work as hard to sell it,” Smyth said.

UC San Diego theater professor Floyd Gaffney introduced Langston Hughes’ Gospel show, “Black Nativity,” to the San Diego community three years ago. He acknowledged that there is a hope that an annual holiday show can “generate some bucks” for the Southeast Community Theatre, although his ambitions for “Black Nativity” are still fairly modest.

“Ultimately, we’ll get to the point where we’ll have some costumes ahead of time,” he said.

But he said the main reason he pushed the show is that “there was nothing going on in San Diego that reflected blacks and their religious participation in Christmas.

“People need to look up from the audience and see themselves on stage. That’s why we do it.”

The success these theaters have had with their holiday shows has not escaped the notice of other companies.

The leaders of the Old Globe Theatre, for instance, have been thinking about producing a Christmas show for years.

“I’d love to be able to amortize a show over five, six years. Nothing would make me happier,” Jack O’Brien, the Old Globe’s artistic director, said. “It’s like a long run. Everyone prays for that to happen. We’ve been talking about it for four to five years at least.”

In 1983-84, O’Brien even considered producing “A Christmas Carol,” but changed his mind because of the San Diego Rep’s involvement with the show.

“We decided to stay out of the Rep’s way. ‘A Christmas Carol’ is the great guaranteed fund-raising event. But they were doing it, and they were doing it beautifully. It was their territory, and it was their major fund-raiser, and we felt it was inappropriate for us to do it.”

Instead, O’Brien and Thomas Hall, the managing director of the Globe, are developing two possible Christmas shows, one of which may be ready as early as next year. And, in the meantime, O’Brien will be making his holiday contribution by reading portions of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” as part of the San Diego Symphony’s “Holiday Delights” program Dec. 14-16 at Copley Symphony Hall.

Another possible offering next year may be a third holiday show from Lamb’s Players Theatre. Before the company commits to that, however, Smyth will have to see whether there is audience enough for “A Festival of Christmas” and “Dickens, Dining and Song,” which are, in effect, competing with each other this year.

The prospects are promising. Thirty of the 45 scheduled “Festival” performances are already sold out, and previews don’t even begin until tomorrow. Six of the 12 performances of “Dickens, Dining and Song” also are sold out, and that show doesn’t open until Dec. 12.