It's like the Cartoon Network, with a toe dipped into the Adult Swim side, but only live and in person. Thrillride Mechanics describes its style as "hyper-comical theater of human animation," and It's Christmas, Carole! shows the fledgling troupe making its way nicely down that route. The same team presented the Alice in Wonderland epilogue Wunderworld last summer (when I was on break doing a Tiny Tim impression on crutches), but I came to Carole with considerable experience and appreciation for the work of its principal figures.
Perhaps because of that I was expecting a bit more heft in the proceedings, beyond the perfectly pleasant and occasionally savvy production at Yerba Buena's Creativity Theater. At its best, this loose 50-minute variation on A Christmas Carol does suggest a toon world in which the woebegone title character finds herself stuck in a revolving door or caught in an elevator between two magpies chattering away, oblivious to her presence. Beyond the cartoon dynamics, there are nearly subliminal sprinklings of real-world emotions that could benefit the story if further explored.
The title character, played by the indefatigably elastic clowner Sara Moore, is an office worker content within her grumpy armor. In her apartment, she shouts out the window for Christmas carolers to quiet down, and when she picks up a local arts magazine that actually did run Moore's photo as Carole on its cover, this hint of meta-theatricality is ratcheted up when a loud voice from the back of the theater yells, "Actors, please hold. Go to your dressing room." But this tantalizing suggestion of intersecting theatrical worlds turned out just to be an opening-night technical snafu �" though so well-covered by Moore that the audience hadn't realized anything was wrong.
In Michael Phillis' script, it seems clear that Carole is the Scrooge stand-in, yet her boss turns out to be even Scoogier, diluting the well-ordained thrust of the Dickens tale. But as modern variations on the visiting ghosts descend upon Carole, fresh comic situations unfold, culminating when she is suddenly a contestant on a game show in which she passes up a car, a vacation, and new furniture for a trip down a black hole that somehow convinces her that she should convince her boss to be kinder to his employees. All this puts the epiphany, even in a cartoon context, at a curious remove.
But we are never less than happy to be among the merry band of players directed by Andrew Nance. In addition to the indispensible Moore, the cast including playwright Phillis, Dave Garrett, Dawn Meredith Smith, and Rory Davis multitask from office drudges to Vanna White types. There is a crafty office-paper puppet ghost designed by Fontaine Cole, and fun costumes by Annie Sarazan. The fact that there are no sets on the expansive stage leaves the actors at a center-stage sofa or desk looking diminished. Anything that could help concentrate focus �" curtains, flats, screens �" might suggest some of the heft that right now seems lacking for whatever age of the target audience.
It's Christmas, Carole! will run through Dec. 22 at the Creativity Theater. Tickets are $10-$20, available at itschristmascarole.com.