How Sierra Madre takes its Mr. Scrooge

Festooned with Christmas lights, the cozy village of Sierra Madre is particularly picturesque at this time of year. Make your way through the outlying Craftsman bungalows along the rows of cafes on the main streets and you’ll find the Sierra Madre Playhouse, a neighborhood fixture since 1979.

A regular offering at the playhouse since 2002, “A Christmas Carol Story” is an adaptation of Dickens’ Christmas classic written especially for the playhouse by the late Larry Davison. According to the program, director Alison Kalmus, who has staged the show in the past, has made several tweaks to Davison’s original version over the years. Whatever Kalmus’ input is, it’s obviously not that of synthesis. At almost 2 1/2 hours, the production is overlong and only intermittently faithful to its source material.

The show, which features a pleasing array of folk songs and time-honored carols, has been produced in association with the Southern California Lyric Theater, and indeed, there are many sterling voices to be heard throughout the evening, some of near-operatic quality. The large and lively cast, clad in an ambitious array of uncredited costumes, brings genuine commitment to the proceedings.

Judging from the large and appreciative audience, “A Christmas Carol Story” has become a bit of a tradition around these parts, and in that regard, it holds plenty of charm. However, although certainly proficient by any community theater standards, this “Carol” does not quite reach the bar of a professional production.

Double-cast in the role, John Szura proves a competent Scrooge. However, his butt-length gray hair is an anachronistic distraction that could have been easily surmounted by an appropriate period wig.

-- F. Kathleen Foley

“A Christmas Carol Story,” Sierra Madre Playhouse, 87 W. Sierra Madre Blvd., Sierra Madre. 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2:30 p.m. Sundays, 2:30 on Dec. 13 and 20, 7 p.m. Dec. 21. Also 8 p.m. Dec. 22 and 23. Ends Dec. 23. $20. (626) 256-3809. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.

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Dickens’ classic set in Chicago

Well, God bless us, every one. Charles Dickens’ holiday staple has been visited by a trio of ghostly life coaches. The musical “A Chicago Christmas Carol,” by Crown City Theatre Company, is the result.

Hovering in the ether, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill bestow an extra measure of social consciousness on this production, while Upton Sinclair lends his setting from “The Jungle.” So the familiar characters, plus a few new ones, are plunged into icy, sooty, early-1900s Chicago to try to eke out a living in or near the sinister abattoir run by Ebenezer Scrooge.

The most poignant variation in this show by Crown City artistic directors William A. Reilly (book and music) and Gary Lamb (lyrics) is the inclusion of a mother and daughter (Joanne McGee and, at the reviewed performance, Shannon Lamb) whose Christmas Eve eviction forces them into the streets.

The girl becomes this version’s Tiny Tim, while Tim himself matures into a 17-year-old labor organizer who, as portrayed by power-piped Malek Hanna, delivers a workers’ song that is the production’s most rousing moment.

Throughout the score, the plodding rhythms of everyday drudgery leap, whenever possible, into a joyful dance.

At a piano beside the stage, Reilly provides the jaunty, blood-pumping accompaniment.

The designs are basic but resourceful, the performances pleasant if rarely stellar. Then again, in his very ordinariness, Michael Vodde, as Scrooge, reminds us that sneering, miserly impulses reside in us all. Most important, the presentation, directed by Tam Warner, retains Dickens’ generous spirit, even when exercising tough love on its characters -- and, by extension, the audience.

-- Daryl H. Miller

“A Chicago Christmas Carol,” St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church campus, 11031 Camarillo St., North Hollywood. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends Dec. 21. $20. (818) 377-4055. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.

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From Marley’s point of view

Literate imagination underlines “Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol” in its Orange County premiere at the Chance Theater. A regional favorite, Tom Mula’s holiday play revisits the Charles Dickens classic from the perspective of Scrooge’s late partner.

Originally performed as a solo show, the play was reconfigured by Mula in 2001 for ensemble playing. A coffin dominates the ledger-logged contours of designer Christopher Scott Murillo’s set, as the company echoes Dickens by assuring us that Marley is indeed dead.

Thereafter, Marley (the valiant Bryan Barton) finds himself where a hardened misanthrope should expect to wind up. His time on Earth, as recounted in the afterlife records, gives Marley scant hope to avoid damnation. However, in tandem with the impish Bogle (vividly appealing Marisa Persson) assigned to Marley for eternity, a loophole emerges -- “Scrooge? I have to redeem old Scrooge? The one man I knew who was worse than I was? Impossible!”

Using means that recall “Liliom” by way of “Story Theatre,” Mula sifts Dickens’ plot into Marley’s previously undisclosed history. Marley’s objective thereafter becomes not just Scrooge’s (Glenn Koppel) redemption, but his own.

Staged by Tony Vezner, the production is typically proficient, if overly measured, with resourceful designs, Jeff Brewer’s lighting very atmospheric. Although he reads rather young, Barton’s rubber-faced sonority serves Marley nicely, well attuned to Persson’s bounce and Koppel’s bluster. Alex Bueno, Jeff Hellebrand, Bryan Seastrom and the unaffected Rylee Montgomery complete a determined cast that gives the melange of dialects and presentational techniques their full concentration.

It’s respectable work, albeit chained to a narration-heavy text that is a shade too reliant on the reader’s theater strategies and somber gravitas. Yes, Dickens is dark, but sometimes the property verges on “No Exit.” That still won’t prevent this worthy storytelling display from becoming an annual Anaheim crowd-pleaser.

-- David C. Nichols

“Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol,” Chance Theater, 5552 E. La Palma Ave., Anaheim Hills. 8 p.m. Fridays, 3 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. Ends Dec. 21. $30-$35. (714) 777-3033. Running time: 1hour, 55 minutes.

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It falls into much of what it mocks

The very title of Overtone Industries’ “It’s a Pretty Good Life” may be an implicit plea for lowered expectations -- but not low enough, unfortunately.

This freewheeling Christmas comedy with songs brings together some major talents from Los Angeles’ fringe performing arts scene, with disappointingly minor results.

Conceived by Kathleen Cramer, O-Lan Jones and Andrea Stein as a parody of artistic pretension and concessions to mass-market appetites, the piece revolves around the efforts of a trio of female would-be stage impresarios who decide to produce an alternative version of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.”

Among the obstacles facing the Three Wise Babes (Jones, Molly Bryant and Martha Gehman): They arrive at their rented venue without a script, props or even a cast.

“We’re supposed to do a play,” declares Jones. “That’s the fly in the ointment as I see it.”

Indeed it is.

After wrestling with some internal conflicts and engaging in some loosely associative metaphysical banter, they hold their first auditions -- on opening night. Wayne (Eric B. Anthony), a sunny tap-dancer, is cast as Scrooge.

For Tiny Tim, the Babes choose a wheelchair-bound theoretical physicist named Screamin’ Stephen J. Hawkings -- get it? -- played with Katharine Hepburn-esque palsied vibrato by John Fleck.

Amping up the satire as he’s wheeled around by his eye-candy nurse (Ali Tobia), Hawkings out-of-tunefully riffs on the equation of stardom with thermonuclear reactions in the formation of black holes.

For no apparent reason, the Babes switch the roles of Wayne and Hawkings, who literally rises to the occasion by leaping from his wheelchair.

OK, so continuity and coherence are off the table here.

But the fundamental rule in parody is that you have to be better than your target, and here the piece suffers from way too much of the pretentious self-indulgence that it ridicules.

Tony Abatemarco’s staging offers some fleeting pleasures in Fleck’s hamming his way through an abbreviated version of the Scrooge story, but the play-within-a-play doesn’t even start until an hour in.

-- Philip Brandes

“It’s a Pretty Good Life,” Miles Playhouse, 1130 Lincoln Blvd., Santa Monica. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. Ends Dec. 21. $25. (323) 655-2410. Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes.