1812 Production presents 'The Carols'

The bah

The Carols, written by artistic director and multi-talented dynamo Jennifer Childs (book and lyrics) with music by Monica Stephenson, is a too-sweet sugarplum that recycles Dickens with dollops of Neil Simon, vaudeville shtick, and "Who's on First?"

It's 1944 in a dingy VFW hall in Picatinny, New Jersey, where three sisters organize a Christmas pageant despite wartime gloom and the absence of men. Everyone left in town, says Rose (Caroline Dooner), is "sad, old, mean, and poor," but the show must go on.

The characters are drawn in thick crayon; Rose refuses to correctly pronounce common words, so "ghosts" to her are "gee-hosts." Sylvia (Emily Kleimo) adores Eleanor Roosevelt. A few minutes in, Lily (Rachel Camp), whose defining quirk is her modern slang (good things are "killer diller!"), explains to the audience that "this is a sentimental story," as if we couldn't figure it out. Suddenly we have a narrator repeating everything for us, telling us about being a narrator, and sketching the decades after the story. Check out Simon's autobiographical plays like Brighton Beach Memoirs for a similarly egregious use of this tiresome device.

They hold auditions, but no one comes except Mel (Anthony Lawton), a Borscht Belt comedian passing through town, spouting old jokes. His butchering of Dickens's story is hilarious. They somehow rehearse Sylvia's script without a Scrooge, although they hope that Miss Betty (Mary Martello), the grump with a heart of gold who runs the post, will play the role. Gee, will she?

Stephenson and Childs's songs carry the show, even the sisters' "Marry an American," the crescendo of their A Christmas Carol before it's hijacked by all that sentimentality Lily warned us about. The sisters' harmonies are lovely and earnest. Music director TJ Harris is the onstage accompanist; what looks like an old upright piano sounds distractingly like an electronic keyboard.

The humbug

The Carols strives to be all things: Lily's sentimental memory play, a backstage farce, a redemption story, a romantic comedy, an identity crisis drama, and a patriotic booster, wrapped in an inspirational bow using Christmas renewal as a springboard for modern female empowerment -- and none of them seems original or organic. The "Who's on First" riff, for example, Lawton and Martello's shining moment, is an exquisitely timed version about Scrooge's three ghosts — but it's an homage to a tired old bit that would take us out of the story, were we in it.

The Carols feels like a loose collection of familiar moments constructed with duct tape and rubber cement. This too-easy artificiality makes The Carols less than the sum of its parts, though a pleasant, albeit hollow, two hours' diversion. It's a strange show that talks about heart and employs a beloved story about heart, but doesn't actually share much.

I fully expect to find coal in my stocking.