STAGE REVIEW : ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’

GARDEN GROVE —  Director Thomas F. Bradac has reworked the Grove Theatre Company’s fourth annual production of Dylan Thomas’ “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” a holiday entertainment many felt was already in fine working order.

Gone this year is the turntable set of a Welsh pub and Thomas’ Swansea home; Bradac felt the old look was too bulky. The chummy living-room, with its familiar banquet table, remains to hold the central action as the poet recalls the bittersweet moments of his best Christmas, when he was young enough to love everything on its own terms.

Filling the stage with outsized presents wrapped in shiny foil paper and bold bows, Bradac and designer Gil Morales remind us that the season is tantamount to a fantasy world for children. The director may be having some fun as well: Do the surreal images also evoke the materialism of Christmas? The young Thomas, perkily played by Danny Oberbeck, certainly dwells on the gifts he is about to receive more than the ones he is about to give.

Bradac also felt that Thomas’ language, a mixture of poetic detail and diary prose (adapted for the stage by Jeremy Brooks and Adrian Mitchell), needed to be emphasized even more than in past years. And with Gary Bell employing his full baritone as the adult Thomas remembering, all the lovely winter images (“irreligious snow,” “ear-pinching air”) ring through.

But the changes are not extreme. The singing of several traditional carols by the able cast is still the show’s touchstone. This production is a bit more fanciful but, in the end, summons the same feelings as earlier ones--the pleasures of Christmas minus most of the mawkish overcoating that too often smothers holiday productions.

The faults, too, are pretty much the same as in earlier efforts. Certain scenes--especially involving Thomas and his innocently roguish pals--seem overextended. There’s a pressing “It’s a Wonderful Life” sentimentality that bubbles up as Bradac and his cast linger, a little full of themselves. But as Christmas pageants go, this continues to be remarkable--a tour through a holiday landscape raised above the mundane by the guide’s literary style.

At 12852 Main St., Garden Grove, Wednesdays through Saturdays and Dec. 19, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m. (except Dec. 24); matinees Saturdays and Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends Dec. 24. $16-$20; (714) 636-7213.