THEATER REVIEW : The Spirit of Laughter Dominates This ‘Carol’

Tiny Tim’s weight problem is breaking his father’s back. Bob Cratchit is having an affair with the director. And Scrooge wants to do his lines in Spanish to protest the United States’ exploitation of Central America.

Yes, the Soapbox Playhouse is having problems with its 13th annual production of “A Christmas Carol.”

Daniel Sullivan’s 1991 “Inspecting Carol,” now in a very funny production at the North Coast Repertory Theatre, takes you inside a struggling theater’s attempt to balance its hopelessly unbalanced books with its one sure annual moneymaker.

Last year’s Laguna Playhouse production had 12,000 patrons rolling in the aisles, with people scrambling to get tickets. Tempting as it might have been to bring it back, artistic director Andrew Barnicle explains that he couldn’t see himself doing “a revival of a play about how awful revivals can be.”

So he did the next best thing. He recommended it to a friend, Olive Blakistone, artistic director of the North Coast, where Barnicle served as associate artistic director before being tapped to take over the helm at Laguna.

And a fine job North Coast has done with with this witty play. The first act will make you laugh. The second will make you laugh until you cry.

The managing director, Kevin Emery (Gerard Maxwell) announces that the company is having a cash-flow problem. Translation: There’s no cash. The director thanks heaven for the $30,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts--the only thing that will keep the theater’s doors open. Oh, yes, Emery says, about that grant--it’s been rescinded pending an artistic evaluation.

Sullivan, the head of the nationally renowned Seattle Repertory Theatre, knows the embattled turf of regional theaters and has served on NEA fund-granting panels. He wrote the show in collaboration with members of his own company, most of whom were veterans of “A Christmas Carol” stagings. So it’s no surprise that he gets the details--the egos, the infighting, the gossip, the politically correct confusion--exquisitely right.

As a theater pro, he also borrows from the best. The play’s engine is fueled by Gogol’s “The Inspector General,” in which a town foolishly falls over itself trying to bribe a clerk who has been mistaken for a powerful government investigator.

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In “Inspecting Carol,” the town becomes the theater company and the clerk an itinerant actor mistaken for an NEA investigator. To get on the actor’s good side, the Soapbox players give him a role and allow him to rewrite and restage scenes to disastrous but hilarious effect.

Patricia Elmore Costa’s direction begins tentatively but crackles when the comic machinery of the mistaken identity is in place. K.B. Merrill gives a nice, deadpan reading to the sarcastic M.J., the stage manager/technical director and understudy for all female roles for all 13 seasons.

It’s a nice contrast to Sandra Ellis-Troy’s frenetically overloaded director, Zorah Bloch. Still, no one could be more over the top than Robert Larsen as Larry Vauxhall, the Scrooge with a one-man mission to challenge the audience with extreme and extraneous political and artistic choices.

Walter Murray broods well as Walter, the black actor Bloch hired as an appeasement to the NEA’s multicultural casting demands. Gerard J. Maxwell gives us an alarmed Kevin, the managing director who inherited the unmanageable deficit.

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Pat DiMeo and Tom Kilroy bring a sweet inanity to the parts of unflappable veteran “Christmas Carol” actors. And John Guth gives a nice, nervous can’t-believe-my-good-luck reading to itinerant actor Wayne.

Marty Burnett’s sets rise to the peculiar design challenges of this play in which cheesy, second-rate-looking backdrops have to mask the complicated comic scenic effects to come.

Unlike the Soapbox Playhouse, the North Coast always manages to come up with a new and usually acerbic look at the Christmas hoopla each year. This is definitely one of the more inspired choices, a tonic to “Christmas Carol” overload, and one certain to keep us laughing, every one.

* “Inspecting Carol,” North Coast Repertory Theatre, 987D Lomas Santa Fe Drive, Solana Beach. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays 2 and 7 p.m. Ends Dec. 31. $14-16. (619) 381-1055. Running time: 2 hours, 2 minutes.

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John Guth: Wayne Wellacre

K.B. Merrill: M.J. (Mary Jane) McMann

Sandra Ellis-Troy: Zorah Bloch

Michael Bierman: Luther Beatty

Pat DiMeo: Dorothy Tree Hapgood

Tom Kilroy: Sidney Carlton

Clay Rider: Phil Hewitt

Walter Murray: Walter E. Parsons

Gerard J. Maxwell: Kevin Emery

Christopher Pickett: Bart Frances

Robert Larsen: Larry Vauxhall

Ann Richardson: Betty Andrews

A North Coast Repertory Theatre production of a comedy by Daniel Sullivan. Directed by Patricia Elmore Costa. Sets: Marty Burnett. Lights: Christopher Rynne. Costumes: Bryan Schmidtberger. Sound: Tony Crescenzo. Stage manager: Sue Schaffner.