STAGE REVIEW : A Christmas Card From the Great Plains : Nebraska troupe will bring its delicious production of Dickens’ holiday classic to Orange Coast College on Sunday.

Theater companies have given “A Christmas Carol” innumerable spins over the years. One production set the story in the American Depression; others have rendered the material as one-man staged readings. Scrooge can be a psychological cripple or a clown. But rare is a production that makes you feel you’re seeing and hearing the story for the first time.

Well, that’s what the Nebraska Theater Caravan does for Southern California. The moment the curtain goes up on a snowy London street scene, you sense the frost in the air, the Industrial Revolution, the humble working class, the misery, joy and brotherhood that Dickens, then 31 and composing the novella over the course of one month in November, 1843, packed into his story.

The company, which operates under the wing of the Omaha Community Playhouse, delivers a traditional “Carol” with such detail and flavor and lavish sets and costumes and a wonderful, tall, gawky and intimidating/delirious Scrooge (Cork Ramer) that you walk away with the merry sensation of having just dropped by the Cratchits and feasted on roast goose and plum pudding.

The company’s artistic director, Charles Jones (who directed and adapted the tale), has ambitiously woven several Christmas carols, some exotically obscure, into the dramatization. The singing from the huge cast is accompanied by a live four-piece ensemble, and, by design, there’s no effort to make the songs propel the text.

The music, with contemporary scoring by arranger John Bennett, is a mixed blessing. The refrains and choreography are short musical bursts that add a holly wreath to the two-hour show but also tend to impede momentum.

A creepy dramatic highlight is Scrooge watching two charwomen pick over his cadaver.

Jacob Marley’s ghost (a genuinely horrific Paul Stober) and the ghost of Christmas Present (the roaring Ty Stover) are emblematic of the vivid casting and the boisterous costuming--we’re talking Broadway-spectacle designs here.

This production, which drew more than 1,000 patrons Thursday at El Camino College’s Marsee Auditorium in Gardena, resumes today in the Smothers Theatre at Pepperdine University in Malibu and concludes its local tour Sunday at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa.

* The Nebraska Theater Caravan will perform Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” on Sunday at 2:30 p.m. in the Robert B. Moore Theatre, Orange Coast College, 2701 Fairview Road, Costa Mesa. Tickets: $10.50 for adults, $6.50 for seniors and children under 12 by advance purchase; $12 and $8 at the door. Information: (714) 432-5880.