Seasoned Greetings : Veteran Actors Bring Back ‘Child’s Christmas’ With New Touches

When Bud Leslie took over last year as director of Grove-Shakespeare’s holiday chestnut, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” he talked about his wish to put more focus on the play’s language and its “Welshness.”

Back for his second year at the helm, Leslie is getting an opportunity to put even more of a personal stamp on the production, this time by overseeing the creation of the first new set in the production’s seven-year history. The play opens tonight.

Although he’s excited about the new design, by Rob Wyatt, Leslie admits it came about largely by accident.

“We had an overzealous tech director destroy the old set over the summer,” Leslie said in an interview at the Gem Theatre. “There were a few minutes of cursing, but it worked out well.”

“A Child’s Christmas in Wales” is a stage adaptation (by Jeremy Brooks and Adrian Mitchell), part drama and part song, of Dylan Thomas’ prose memory piece about boyhood holidays in his native Swansea in Wales. Leslie, who is entering his fifth year as an actor in the production, says the company had started to stray from the play’s Welsh roots before he took over last year.

Leslie said friends told him “it had become a play about a lot of happy people who just got happier and happier.” He wanted to give a more realistic representation of the characters’ lives; last year, for instance, he dispensed with the big, shiny Mylar-wrapped packages that dominated the stage in the production two years ago.

This year, he asked Wyatt to come up with a set that is at once warmer and cozier, with wooden floors and a real gas lamp, and also heavy on grays and blues. That color scheme emphasizes the “bitter cold” of a Welsh winter and gives scenes the flavor of an old black-and-white photograph--”almost like you were looking back through a photo album,” Leslie explained.

Wyatt’s technical challenge was accommodating Leslie’s vision of the set (partly inspired by the parlor set in the recent Grove-Shakespeare production of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”) while meeting the technical demands of the fast-flowing play. “It goes from scene to scene to scene to scene without any blackouts,” Wyatt said.

He accomplished the task by using four small turntables, replacing the one large turntable of the old set.

The cast has a fairly new look under Leslie as well. Last year, in the first production after company founder Thomas Bradac was forced out by new board members, Leslie brought 10 new actors to the cast of 15. This year, five new players join the cast.

Through the cast changes and other shifts of recent years, however, some of the core cast is unchanged. Four actors remain from the first production, directed by Dan Cartmell: Gary Bell, who doubles as Dylan’s father and the mature poet; Danny Oberbeck, who plays the young Dylan; Marnie Crossen, the play’s Aunt Nellie, and Rick Tigert, who portrays Tom and one of the firemen.

Performing together for seven years has “made us like a family,” Bell said in a group interview before a recent rehearsal.

“There’s a real spirit,” Tigert chimed in. “We don’t return for money. We don’t return so we can be seen by agents--they don’t come to Garden Grove.”

Added Bell: “We feel like we’re doing something worthwhile.”

Oberbeck said that performing in the play has become his own Christmas tradition, and a tradition for many of the families who come to the production year after year.

“We’re their Christmas parade,” he said. “We’re their ‘Grinch Who Stole Christmas.’ We’re what they look forward to each year.”

As for himself, Oberbeck said, “I can hardly remember Christmas without it.”

According to Crossen, bringing new actors into the other roles helps keep the experience fresh year after year; most important though, she said, is the challenge to “keep the bite in it, to not make it a sugary sweet thing.”

Leslie brought in Welsh composer Michael Lewis to talk to the cast this year and share his memories of Christmas in Wales. Leslie said such talks have inspired him to add small touches to the production that help evoke the time (early this century) and the place. The gas-lighting scene at the beginning of the play was the result of one such talk and was added as much for the sound of the ritual (hissing gas, for instance) as for its visual effect.

Tigert said his father has suggested keeping the theater temperature cold for the performances, to better bring theater-goers into the mood of the piece. Leslie continues to search for ways to give the play a more visceral effect on viewers, to make them feel as if they are “looking into a window on a Welsh family,” in Oberbeck’s words.

“If I could shoot smell into the theater,” Leslie said, “I think I would.”

“A Child’s Christmas in Wales” runs tonight through Dec. 27 at the Gem Theatre, 12852 Main St. in Garden Grove. Show times: Wednesday through Friday at 8 p.m.; Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m.; Sunday at 3 and 7:30 p.m. Tickets: $20-$24. (Theater-goers who bring a bag of packaged food or an unwrapped toy to the Wednesday, Thursday or Sunday evening performances will be admitted for half price. Donated goods will be distributed among several charities Grove-Shakespeare works with.) Information: (714) 636-7213.