Almost every holiday season since the mid-1970s, at least one professional theater company in San Diego has presented Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” a beloved tradition that also plays out on stages in many other cities across America.
For audiences, the experience is heartwarming and special. But for some of the low-paid, peripatetic actors who return to the same productions year after year, it’s perhaps less magical than it is a practical way to practice their craft and earn enough to qualify for another year of health insurance.
That’s the case for Eddie, the pompous but rarely booked Juilliard-trained actor who unhappily winds up performing in the same production of “A Christmas Carol” for 26 years in Anna Ouyang Moench’s backstage comedy “Your Local Theater Presents: A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens, Again.” The funny and heartwarming 80-minute play made its world premiere Sunday at La Jolla Playhouse.
Virtually the entire play is set in the grimy green room of an East Coast theater, where the actors rest, chat, sip tea, have potlucks and exchange Secret Santa gifts before the final, Christmas Eve performance of that year’s “Christmas Carol” run. The story unspools in four scenes, each set in a different year: 1997, 2001, 2010 and 2023. The audience watches new actors come and go, and a handful of returnees, like Eddie, who works his way up from Ebenezer Scrooge’s nephew Fred, to Scrooge’s clerk Bob Cratchit to the lead role of Scrooge himself.
Directed by Les Waters with a rich vein of humor and swift pacing, “Your Local Theater Presents” is chock full of theater insider jokes, like actors’ weird preshow warmups, pushy stage moms, child actors toting a “swear jar,” corny audition showcase songs and dances and one-day paid gigs on procedural dramas like “Law & Order.”
Moench’s play is about these stage actors and not about Dickens’ play — except that it is, but with a contemporary twist that audiences may not see coming until the end.
In Dickens’ “Carol,” Scrooge is orphaned, heartbroken over a long-lost love and utterly alone when he finds redemption and rediscovers the value of family one magical Christmas Eve night. In Moench’s play, the bitter and standoffish Eddie was effectively orphaned by parents who couldn’t accept his homosexuality, he’s eventually divorced from his husband and unhappily estranged from their teenage son. Like Scrooge, Eddie’s in dire need of some miraculous intervention.
Miles G. Jackson leads the cast as Eddie, who credibly ages through periods of snide insecurity in his mid-20s, to happily falling in love in his 30s, to withdrawn and lonely in his 40s.
Just as Scrooge was guided toward redemption by the repentant ghost of his former partner, Jacob Marley, Eddie is gently tutored and warmly praised by Oliver, the philandering and hard-drinking but generous-of-spirit actor who plays Scrooge each year. Marco Barricelli is marvelous in his larger-than-life performance as the flawed but venerable Richard Burton-like character.
Four other actors, all terrific and versatile, alternate in multiple roles as performers in the theater’s different “Christmas Carol” productions: Juliet Brett, Tony Larkin, Maria Elena Ramirez and Xavier J. Bush. Brett is particularly funny as a series of marginally talented child actors playing the juvenile role of a Cratchit kid.
“Your Local Theater” isn’t really a Christmas story, nor is it a re-telling of “A Christmas Carol.” It’s a story about family — the loving (if occasionally dysfunctional) family of actors who bond together every holiday season to practice the craft they love, bring joy to the public and then go their separate ways.
‘Your Local Theater Presents: A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens, Again’
When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 1 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Through Dec. 15
Where: La Jolla Playhouse’s Sheila and Hughes Potiker Theatre, 2910 La Jolla Village Drive, UC San Diego, La Jolla
Tickets: $30 and up
Phone: 858-550-1010
Online: lajollaplayhouse.org
