Holiday Leftovers

‘Tis the season for theater companies in Orange County to face the fact that God does not bless them, every one, with a classic, bankable Christmas play.

South Coast Repertory, the county’s leading professional theater, long ago secured a vast share of the season’s box office bounty with its adaptation of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” The play began its 20th consecutive seasonal run over the weekend. By the time it closes Dec. 26, it’s likely that 15,000 or more people will have made Scrooge, Marley, the Cratchits, the Ghosts of Christmas and one of literature’s most heartwarming endings part of their holiday celebration.

Virtually every play the nonprofit South Coast Repertory mounts is, in strictly commercial terms, a box-office loser that has to be subsidized with the donations that make up 30% of the theater’s budget. The only exceptions, said David Emmes, SCR’s producing artistic director, are the annual Christmas plays: “A Christmas Carol” yields a profit that helps support other productions, and “La Posada Magica,” an SCR-commissioned musical steeped in Mexican American Christmas traditions that has become a break-even proposition since it was introduced in 1994 on the Second Stage.

With SCR owning the franchise, other companies are left to search, improvise, reheat lesser chestnuts that have become part of the standard holiday repertory, or simply sit out the season for lack of anything that makes financial, logistical or artistic sense.

“It’s hard to find a Christmas show worth doing that isn’t either so syrupy sweet that everybody is going to gag on it, or that has already been done. There’s no reason to do another ‘Christmas Carol,’ ” said Gary Christensen, producer at Alternative Repertory Theatre in Santa Ana, one of the companies that will produce no holiday play this year.

ART, a respected grass-roots survivor founded in 1987, knows how difficult it is to cultivate a holiday perennial: For seven years through 1994, it staged “A Christmas Memory,” a nostalgic holiday play by Truman Capote. But audience interest waned, and other plays plugged into the holiday slot haven’t inspired revivals. Last year, ART commissioned what it hoped would become a yearly standard: “Barrio Everyman,” a contemporary Latino take on “Everyman,” the allegorical morality play from medieval times. Construction delays on ART’s new headquarters in the Grand Central Arts Center bumped the play to January, where it didn’t fare well enough to revive this year, Christensen said. ART is leaning toward another dark Christmas season in 2000, he said.

“It’s a Scrooge thing to say, but [there will be no Christmas play] unless we need a cash cow. We’ll pick a Christmas show to play to the crowd,” he said. “Most of the shows we pick, we don’t necessarily worry about playing to the crowd.”

Laguna Playhouse, which ranks second to SCR in budget and prestige, also decided not to do a holiday-themed show this year.

“We have scrupulously avoided getting locked into doing a show every year,” said Richard Stein, the theater’s executive director. “It’s wonderful that South Coast Repertory has ‘A Christmas Carol.’ If they weren’t producing it, either we or other theaters in Orange County would establish that franchise.”

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In the past, Laguna Playhouse has gone for a little of this, a little of that. In 1994, it did turn-away business for the Southern California premiere of “Inspecting Carol.” The play by Daniel Sullivan, first produced in 1991, has been a popular choice for many theaters, and is playing this year at the Grove Theater Center Gem Theater in Garden Grove. The comedy concerns a regional theater that has gotten farcically stale producing Dickens’ warhorse year after year.

Mounting “Inspecting Carol” for a second year would have smelled of self-parody, Stein said.

Laguna Playhouse did try to transplant another well-established Christmas production, an adaptation of Dylan Thomas’ memoir, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” which the now-defunct Grove-Shakespeare staged for seven years at the Gem Theater.

It drew well in Laguna in 1996, Stein said, but interest diminished when brought back in 1997.

Last year, Laguna Playhouse didn’t offer a major production, but its Youth Theatre staged an oft-revived family-oriented show, “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever,” adopted in 1982 by Barbara Robinson from her popular children’s story.

The company of student-actors has also chosen not to get locked into presenting an annual Christmas play, Stein said. This month’s holiday offering is a George M. Cohan revue, “45 Minutes From Broadway.”

“It has absolutely nothing to do with Christmas, but it’s great family entertainment at holiday time,” Stein said. “Believe it or not, there are some people who are looking for something that is not Christmasy.”

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For the many who want Christmas on the stage when there’s Christmas in the air--or, in Southern California, at least Christmas music in the air and decorations on homes and stores--there are several community and college theaters that strive to meet the demand.

The Irvine Adult School, based at University High, is putting on a stage adaptation of “It’s a Wonderful Life” for the fifth consecutive year. Audiences have averaged about 100 to 150 for each performance, said Donna Westlund, house manager for the play. “We feel like it’s a huge hit, because people come back again and again,” she said. “People have tears in their eyes when they leave.”

In 1994, the La Habra Depot Theatre launched its revue of popular holiday songs and stories, “Christmas at the Depot.” Last year, it shifted to a classic, “Babes in Toyland,” but patrons said they preferred the homemade production.

“If the community speaks, you’d better listen,” said Millie Fuller, the show’s director and the theater board’s vice president. “It was very heartwarming to know something we tried as an experiment ended up being very popular.”

Producers of community theater say success is generated two ways: by offering a quality Christmas production and by casting kids. Lots of kids. For every young actor in a cast, there may well be scads of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, neighbors and playmates coming to cheer.

“You do the math,” said B.J. Scott, executive producer of South Orange County Community Theatre at Camino Real Playhouse in San Juan Capistrano. Scott is casting 20 children in this year’s production of “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.” The Costa Mesa Civic Playhouse is doing the same play with 17 children in the cast.

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One of the obstacles community theaters have to overcome in putting on Christmas productions is Christmas itself. Relying solely on volunteers to act, direct and provide technical support, producers sometimes find their usual crews are too caught up in the season’s demands to put on a play. Audiences also can be spread too thin in December with family responsibilities, travel and a glut of other entertainment options.

The Huntington Beach Playhouse is not mounting a holiday production for those reasons, said business manager Bettie Muellenberg. Instead, it will help the Huntington Valley Boys and Girls Club put on a single holiday performance at the Playhouse’s theater at the Huntington Beach Central Library.

At Orange Coast College, the theater department is offering its 14th consecutive family-oriented Christmas show, a revue and an original melodrama, “An Old-Fashioned Christmas Show and Ice Cream Social.” But department chairman Rick Golson said a scheduling change in the academic calendar next year will push back the opening of the fall semester by two weeks, making it doubtful the department can stage a Christmas show along with the other productions necessary to teach students.

“I love doing them. They’re always fun and the families like ‘em and the kids like ‘em,” Golson said. “At the same time, we’re so busy that [if the Christmas show is dropped next year] I don’t think I’ll have time to miss it.”

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Other theaters and playwrights aim to find fresh artistic possibilities in an ancient holiday.

The Chance Theater in Anaheim Hills has a world premiere, “Wish You Were Here.” The story, by Laguna Niguel playwright Joseph Hullett, centers on a factory worker who gets downsized on Christmas Day then hatches a “happiness sharing” scheme that gets him institutionalized. It’s a far cry from the adaptation of “The Velveteen Rabbit” the 8-month-old theater originally considered doing as its first Christmas production.

Staging new or rarely produced work is the mission of Spare Change Productions, which operates the Chance, said partner Chris Ceballos. Hullett’s play was a natural fit.

New Voices Playwrights Workshop has been a veritable Santa’s workshop of new Christmas material. This year’s production, “Another 10-Minute Christmas,” at the Costa Mesa Civic Playhouse, features nine 10-minute plays. With two previous short-play Christmas programs behind it (both sellouts, according to New Voices founder Christopher Trela), the workshop now has 30 original pieces. Trela said his group hopes to publish the best ones.

The show isn’t recommended for children younger than high school age, Trela said. “Some of the themes are mature and serious, but there’s no nudity, nothing sacrilegious,” he said. “I think people will be challenged but still come out feeling good about the holiday.”

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Stages, in Fullerton, mainly produces new plays. “We are constantly flooded with scripts,” said Mo Arii, a founding company member. But few of them are Christmas ones. “Christmas doesn’t have that edgy feel that a lot of theaters are looking for,” she said. “I like the sweet Christmas story, but some writers aren’t attracted to that.”

Stages is offering a revised version of “A Fist Full of Christmas” by Todd Langwell, a satiric comedy it first produced several years ago. Also back as a late-night curtain closer is a fresh installment of Joel Beers’ satiric sketch piece, “A Dolt’$ Only Christmas.”

Wade Williamson, artistic director of Fullerton’s Vanguard Theatre Ensemble, seeks an artistic balance between freshness and familiarity. The company’s production this year is “The Farndale Avenue Housing Estate Townswomen’s Guild Dramatic Society Production of ‘A Christmas Carol,’ ” a British spoof on the Dickens classic.

“There’s so much out there that people have already seen,” Williamson said. “We’ve tried to offer an alternative to traditional stuff.”

At the same time, he said, a good Christmas show needs to be family-oriented.

“Holiday shows are a very safe place for people to start going to the theater with their kids,” Williamson said. “Come as a group and share and laugh and talk to each other about why it was so funny and why it was so heartwarming. [Plays like] ‘A Christmas Carol’ encourage discussion and dialogue, and that’s what the theater is about.”