STAGE REVIEWS HOLIDAY SHOWS : A Sampler of Seasonal Offerings : Unwrapping a Fresh ‘Child’s Christmas’

The Times’ Drama Department recently visited a smattering of holiday shows open for business. Here’s a sampling of what’s in and around town .

Though “one Christmas was so much like another” for Dylan Thomas in his youth, the Grove Shakespeare Festival’s annual production of his famous story, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” has been so thoroughly revamped by first-time director Bud Leslie that it seems like a new show.

Freshened by simple staging, but most of all by a welcome emphasis on the poet’s ringing language and some lovely Welsh a cappella music, “A Child’s Christmas” at the Gem Theatre in Garden Grove still recounts Thomas’ Swansea memories of “that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea.”

The show strips away the Norman Rockwell-ish veneer that had begun to overlay recent versions. The sentimentalized tone is gone for the most part, and with it the cloying posterization that had threatened to turn the genuine feeling of the Jeremy Brooks-Adrian Mitchell stage adaptation into a syrupy substitute.

The production also displays a light comic touch throughout, especially in the first-act scenes featuring young Dylan playing with his friends. But it steadfastly avoids pandering to children. That could hurt at the box office.

* “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” Gem Theatre, 12852 Main St., Garden Grove. Wednesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends Dec. 29. $18-22. (714) 636-7213. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.