Gospel Christmas Carol : Theater: San Diego Rep stages the Yule classic around gospel music while remaining faithful to the enduring tale by Charles Dickens.

Just because the San Diego Repertory Theatre is staging Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” as a gospel musical doesn’t mean the local company has descended into trendy updating.

Peter Sellars set Mozart’s “Cosi Fan Tutte” in an East Coast diner, and a recent New York City Opera production of “La Traviata” changed the heroine’s fatal malady from consumption to AIDS. But Rep producing director Sam Woodhouse believes Dickens’ Victorian tale and African-American gospel music were made for each other.

“You would think we would have to radically alter Dickens, but not so. The marriage between Dickens and gospel music is essentially harmonious,” Woodhouse explained in a conversation before rehearsal last week. “This whole project started as a concept, but once we got into it, I was amazed at how compatible the metaphysical imagery was between the two.”

This compatibility came as no surprise to co-director Osayande Baruti. He not only conceived the gospel musical project, but also wrote most of the songs, with assistance from his fiance Kovia Sapo, for the production, which opens Thursday on the Lyceum Stage.

“Like the message of gospel music,” Baruti said, “ ‘A Christmas Carol’ is a story about a man whose soul needs to be redeemed.”

A versatile actor and author, Baruti has written six musicals and has appeared in four Rep productions, including this season’s opening play “Spunk.” Baruti came up with the idea to garb Dickens’ familiar story in gospel robes while he was performing in the Rep’s 1990 production of “A Christmas Carol.”

“One evening I was watching backstage, and I thought, ‘This could be a gospel musical,’ so I wrote a seven-page study and brought it to (Rep artistic director) Doug Jacobs.”

Both Jacobs, who first turned Dickens’ story into a dramatic script for the Rep 16 seasons back, and Woodhouse liked the idea. The company had been presenting “A Christmas Carol” every December since 1976, reworking the concept every other year. Although music has usually decorated the Rep’s productions of “A Christmas Carol,” this is the first time the company has produced the classic Christmas morality tale as a musical.

“This production is about as large a musical as the Rep can afford,” Baruti said. “We have at one point 29 people on stage, including the chorus of 10. With 20 songs, it’s a traditional musical in all the sense that we miss from today’s Broadway productions.”

The gospel music concept, of course, required a few adaptations of Dickens’ story. Dickens’ Victorian London, for starters, was an anachronistic location for a multiethnic cast that regularly breaks into hand-clapping gospel music.

“The locale is now the world: any city, but no particular city,” Baruti said. “Scrooge is still white, but the rest of the cast is multiethnic. The idea is that it takes place in everyman’s front yard. The market scene, however, has the flavor of a third-world, Caribbean open market, where people still sell every kind of food for a holiday feast.”

As the play opens, Baruti portrays Dickens’ role as narrator in the guise of the minister at Marley’s funeral. He leads the congregation in “Black Diamond Express,” a song whose lyric is based on traditional African folklore as transformed into 19th-Century railroad imagery by an African-American preacher in 1829. When Baruti came across the image of a train bound for perdition, he decided to use it as the metaphor for his gospel musical.

“The black diamond express is really the train to hell, the one that old Scrooge is riding. The lyrics say that the devil is the conductor, sin is the engineer and greed the train’s headlights. I liked the image of the train, because, of course, the railroad was such an important symbol in spirituals from the time of slavery and the underground railroad.”

Another major alteration was the party scene in Fezziwig’s living room. Every year, Woodhouse noted, he and Jacobs looked for a way to make the party more festive. Now the party in Fezziwig’s living room has been transformed into a rollicking revival. In a great revival tent, Mrs. Fezziwig opens the scene singing an invitational hymn, a slow, ballad rendering of “Ev’ry Time I Feel the Spirit.” As the congregants join in, the tempo quickens into an upbeat, syncopated choral version of the old spiritual.

Musical director Jimmy Wyatt explained that the show’s musical styles encompass standard hymns and spirituals as well as traditional and contemporary gospel idioms. With fellow Texan Ricky Womack, the show’s choir director, Wyatt fleshed out the tunes Baruti and Sapo wrote with hot rhythms and rich harmonies. The accompanying instruments are the usual gospel choir complement of keyboards, bass guitar and drums.

Woodhouse said that in the past, the Rep’s interpretation of Scrooge’s redemption has stressed the moral lesson of his conversion from an antisocial miser to a more generous contributor to the commonweal. This is the first time, however, that the underlying religious message has been made so explicit, a turn which Woodhouse, who describes himself as a generic secular humanist, finds unexpectedly compelling.

“There’s no getting around the fact that Dickens was a Christian moralist,” Woodhouse stressed. “And this gospel version of his story brings out the spiritual dimension with the incredible power of gospel music.

* The San Diego Repertory Theatre presents a stage musical adaptation of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” Sam Woodhouse and Osayande Baruti, directors; Doug Jacobs, script; music and lyrics by Baruti and Kovia Sapo; Jimmy Wyatt, music director. Dec. 3-27 at the Lyceum Stage, Horton Plaza. Tickets $20-$25 (235-8025).