Hearth Warming

While Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol decks the Missouri Repertory Theatre with boughs of holly, Theatre for Young America is premiering an alternative Dickens with The Cricket on the Hearth, adapted by Gene Mackey and directed by Sidonie Garrett. Though less familiar, Cricket's seasonal message about looking anew at one's blessings gives it a rightful place on a December stage.

On half of Valerie Mackey's split set, the facade of the Gruff and Tackleton toy manufacturing company lines an Old English street scene. It abuts the inside of a home belonging to Caleb Plummer (Chris Gleeson), a toymaker at the beck and call of cranky Mr. Tackleton (Alan Tilson), and Plummer's blind daughter, Bertha (Willa Cordes). Plummer has reared Bertha as a true innocent -- she sees the world only through his sweet-scented and highly embellished descriptions. Their home is falling apart around them, but for all Bertha knows, it's a palace.

Plummer is under an imposing deadline: He has to finish carving several toy boats by Christmas, or he'll get the ax and Bertha will wind up in a home "for the afflicted." They still have the heart and means to host their annual Christmas picnic, though, where they are joined by the cheery Peerybingle family (Michael Derting and Cinnamon Schultz) and their dim-witted nanny (Jennifer Mays). Also invited -- the Plummers really are too good to be true -- are Tackleton and his young, unhappy fiancé, May Fielding (also played by Mays in a cleverly directed bit of double casting), who was engaged to Plummer's son before he strangely disappeared.

The show mixes original carols by Molly Jessup and uses Jake Walker as both a narrator and a mysteriously cloaked and bewigged stranger. Add to Mays' duties the role of some sort of cricket fairy, and you've got a fable that may be too text-heavy for some of the younger tykes. They may also get lost in the adaptation, which uses words like frivolity when glee or laughter might be more comprehensible. But they're sure to understand the peril Bertha faces when she briefly runs away during a heavy snow (made feasible by J.T. Taube's technical direction). Same for the all's-well-that-ends-well moral that concludes the dense but well-acted piece.