STAGE REVIEW

SAN DIEGO — Cheers to the San Diego Repertory Theatre for putting the Christmas spirit into its 14th edition of “A Christmas Carol” on the Lyceum Stage.

The theater could have trotted out the same heartwarming success that “A Christmas Carol” has always been--especially at the end of a tough, controversial season like the one just past.

Instead, director Walter Schoen took an oft-overlooked side of Charles Dickens--his crusades against social injustice--and decided to address one of the sadnesses of our time: homelessness.

The adaptation by Douglas Jacobs is the same; careful staging and the addition of a brief prologue make the difference.

To keep warm, a few of the homeless, in a contemporary, nameless city, are burning books. One of the books, pulled from the flames by a little boy who wants to hear a story, is “A Christmas Carol.” As the boy’s mother reads, the community acts it out, using no more than the materials at hand.

A wastebasket with planks of wood becomes Bob Cratchit’s desk; the vagrants’ fantasized Christmas feast is a tableful of Kentucky Fried Chicken and Cheez-Its, with empty soda and beer cans spiking the holiday wreaths.

The nagging flaw in the production is a timidity about following through on these ideas. Schoen suggests that Dickens’ book, like Cervantes’ manuscript in “Man of La Mancha,” must justify its existence if it’s destined to survive. What needs to be pointed out is that books such as these are sometimes needed to warm people’s hearts even more than their hands.

The problems are glossed over with distracting charm by a vibrant multi-ethnic cast. Standouts are Bruce Nelson, a performer and choreographer who breakdances as Mr. Fezziwig, Sylvia M’Lafi Thompson as the forceful mother/narrator, W. Francis Walters as a more bourgeois than Victorian Scrooge and 9-year-old Kory Abosada as Tiny Tim and young Ebenezer.

But the production’s crowning achievement is that as the theater crowds exit through a glittering, bedecked Horton Plaza, it becomes impossible to ignore the homeless stretched out not far from the upscale stores.

This “Christmas Carol”--in true Dickensian spirit--worms out the Scrooge in us all, and reminds us of how each person must find his own wellspring of compassion if anything is to change.

At 79 Horton Plaza in San Diego, Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m., with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2, until Dec. 24. Tickets: $15-23; (619) 235-8025.