Holiday Spoof Hilarious Despite Rough Edges

“Inspecting Carol” Saturday, Dec. 5, Lake City Playhouse, Coeur d’Alene

The backstage spoof, “Inspecting Carol,” should come with a money-back guarantee. If you don’t laugh, you’ll get your money back. Actually, if you don’t laugh, you might be dead.

That is proven once again at the Lake City Playhouse in this earnest, hit-and-miss production. The finale, in which the “Soapbox Players” stage a wildly inept version of Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol,” is full of belly-laughs. I thought I was going to lose it altogether when Marley’s ghost came clanking down the stairs with a stage light hooked to the end of his chain.

This comedy is truly one of the cleverest holiday spoofs ever created. Dan Sullivan and the Seattle Repertory Theatre came up with two sure-fire comic gimmicks when they wrote this piece. First, they recognized that “A Christmas Carol” is as familiar as “The Wizard of Oz” in our culture. So they give us a parody version in which Tiny Tim is six feet tall and Scrooge protests American involvement in Central America. Second, they mine bad theater for all of the laughs it can produce, and believe me, that’s plenty. The apex arrives when the Ghost of Christmas Past lifts up her robe to reveal … a turkey. Or maybe it comes when Scrooge gets goosed by his own gravestone.

That this all works so well is a credit to the script, because the Lake City Playhouse’s amateur cast, even though earnest, seemed underrehearsed and rushed. The majority of the cast members bulldozed through their lines either too rapidly or too stiffly, with the result that a great deal of the verbal humor was lost. Lines were recited or blurted, as opposed to spoken naturally. They need to pay much more attention to timing.

When I saw this play at the Interplayers Ensemble, the verbal wordplay was just as hilarious as the physical comedy. Here, we only get the physical comedy, although, fortunately, that’s enough. Director Rebecca Morrison has done a fine job of choreographing the physical stunts.

The two cast members who fully grasped their characters were Marianne Revels as Dorothy Tree-Hapgood, and Darrell Louks as Sidney Carlton. They were hilariously believable as seasoned, and slightly pompous, theater veterans. Their diction and timing were impeccable.

The rest of the cast is talented, too, but they need a bit more seasoning, which they will get as the production continues. Once they lose some of that nervousness, more of this show will begin to click.

They have great material to work with here. They’re going to get laughs no matter what; now all they need to do is have as much fun as possible in maximizing those laughs.