Novelist Jeffrey Scott (Jon Lorenz), suffering from a bad case of writer’s block, hopes a stay at the picturesque if deserted inn called The Angel’s Arms will provide inspiration and get the creative juices flowing again.

What he finds is a muse in Mrs. April Boswell (Chrissy Reynolds Vögele); together they imagine a story that takes place on Christmas Eve, 1851, back when the Arms was a going concern.

In honor of Lamb’s Players’ 30th Festival of Christmas, Kerry Meads’ popular Angel’s Arms installment has been brought back. It plays through Dec. 28; Meads directs.

Angel’s Arms features West Indian immigrant Nicholas Cobham (Leonard Patton), running the inn with little help from flighty teenage charges

Rosemary (Kaitlyn Nicole Terrill) and Charlotte MacNeil (Whitney Fortmueller), for whom Nick has recently been named guardian.

Sharing the inn this night are the kittenish Lisley Witherspoon (Season Duffy) and her stuffy fiance Andrew Farnsworth Hill (Fred De Berg), sailors Matthew Joel Mountport (Patrick J. Duffy) and John Shelly (Nathan Peirson) and the mysterious lady in black, Priscilla Harris (Sandy Campbell).

The plot has a little mystery, a little comedy, a dollop of drama, but for the most (and best) part Angel’s Arms is a musicale of stunningly modern and quite wonderful arrangements of old Christmas favorites. Lorenz shares credit with Deborah Gilmour Smyth and Vanda Eggington for the arrangements of such standards as “The Holly and the Ivy,” “Carol of the Bells,” “What Child is This?” and “Sing We Now of Christmas,” along with “Blow Thou Winter Wind” from Shakespeare’s As You Like It.

Lamb’s Players Festival of Christmas: Angel’s Arms plays through Dec. 28, at Lamb’s Players Theatre in Coronado. Shows Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m.; Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m.; matinees Saturday at 4 and Sunday at 2 p.m. For more information, visit www.gaylesbiantimes.com/links/1095.

What’s a Christmas season without everybody’s favorite eponymous miser, Ebenezer Scrooge?

This year I’ve got two productions of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol for you. Each has strengths and weaknesses.

At North Coast Repertory Theatre, the area’s best Scrooge – Ron Choularton – holds forth with a scowl and a “Bah! Humbug” for everyone, especially his exasperatingly cheerful nephew Fred (Brian Mackey). Not only is Fred annoying, but every time Scrooge turns around, carolers are singing at him. It’s enough to make a hermit out of him. Oh, wait ... he already is a hermit. Well, anyway, Choularton’s better at it than anyone. This Carol is directed by Stephen Elton.

The rest of the cast is fine, and though this Grinch would have preferred more drama and less caroling, this is a pleasant enough version of the famous story.

The weakness? North Coast’s space limitations are more evident here than in any production I’ve seen there. This show has lots of set changes, and the impression left is one of actors as moving men, constantly shoving furniture around.

A Christmas Carol plays through Saturday, Dec. 27, at North Coast Repertory Theatre. Shows Thursday and Friday at 7 p.m.; Saturday at 6 p.m.; matinees Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m.; Tuesday, Dec. 23, at 2 and 7 p.m. For tickets, visit www.gaylesbiantimes.com/links/1095.

Back in town at Cygnet s newly renovated Old Town Theatre, Sean Murray directs his own adaptation of the story. Stagecraft shines here, most especially Matthew Novotny’s gorgeous lighting design that creates more atmosphere with light and shadows than any medium except black-and-white film.

But that’s not to slight the acting. Jim Chovick plays the moneygrubbing Scrooge with less imperiousness but equal disdain for the season and the merriment it affords. Murray’s Christmas ghosts are more instrumental in Scrooge’s change of heart than North Coast’s. In all, a perfectly competent cast, and a special tip of the hat to Mrs. Dilbur (Annie Hinton), whose disapproval of Scrooge’s eccentricities is a delight to behold.

A Christmas Carol plays through Sunday, Dec. 28, at Cygnet Theatre Old Town. Shows Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.; Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 2 and 7 p.m. For more information, visit www.gaylesbiantimes.com/links/1095.

Family dysfunction always seems to intensify at Christmas, when forced good cheer and presumed good will come bang up against the reality of stress and the annoyance of propinquity.

New Village Arts Theatre reprises Off the Ground, the holiday show it commissioned last year from local playwrights Amy Chini and Tom Zohar. Off the Ground plays through Sunday, Dec. 21, and is again directed by Joshua Everett Johnson.

Wannabe writer Joel (John DeCarlo), suffering the pain of divorce and the loss of day-to-day fathering of four-year-old daughter Grace, is still in “temporary” housing with Grandpa Dick (Charlie Riendeau).

Now it’s time for the annual gathering of the clan. Joel’s attempts to pry Dick off the couch to push the vacuum cleaner around having proven fruitless, he sets the old man the task of decorating the mantel with a strand of green tinsel. The clumsy result prompts him to note that “we are men performing a task not given to us by nature.”

Ready or not, the family arrives. First is Joel’s anal retentive sister Susan (Wendy Waddell), early as always, with a huge Christmas tree and husband Luke (Terry Scheidt) in tow. Then Joel and Susan’s mother Ginny (Sandra Ellis-Troy) sweeps in with another (decorated) tree and husband Jim (Jack Missett). Joel is mortified to find she’s also brought something for him – a stranger named Donna (Jo Anne Glover). Good old mom.

Everybody wants something, and over the course of this raucous evening of food, drink, conversation and mutual overtalking, all will realize that despite their differences, disappointments and aggravations, in the end it’s better to be part of a family than not.

New to the cast this year are DeCarlo and Glover, whose characters’ utter discomfort with each other may remind you of blind dates you have been subjected to.

Chini and Zohar have a good feel for the virtues and horrors of family dynamics. Riendeau’s grouchy grandpa, Waddell’s controlling Susan, Ellis-Troy’s meddling mom – it’s like a real family reunion. The playwrights have tightened the first act so that it plays even better than last year.

Off the Ground plays through Sunday, Dec. 21, at New Village Arts Theatre in Carlsbad. Shows Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; matinees Saturday at 3 and Sunday at 2 p.m. For more information, visit www.gaylesbiantimes.com/links/1095.

In 1982, the world discovered Tuna, Texas, where Thurston Wheelis and Arles Struvie reported the news from Radio KKK in the “third smallest town in Texas.” Writers Jaston Williams, Joe Sears and Ed Howard introduced us to some of the wackiest folks this side of Monty Python, and Greater Tuna became the most-performed play of 1985-86 nationwide.

Now it’s the day before Christmas, and all through Tuna these same eccentric folks are preparing for the big day. Fred Harlow and Don Loper play almost two dozen characters, changing costumes, attitudes and mannerisms with lightning speed. A Tuna Christmas plays through Sunday, Dec. 28, at Compass Theatre, directed by Josh Hyatt.

Bertha Bumiller prepares to celebrate the holidays with or without her philandering, never-seen husband, consoling herself by decorating her puny little indoor tree with a license plate made by son Stanley in reform school. Didi Snavely, purveyor of used firearms, noting “if we can’t kill it, it’s immortal,” is married to UFO hunter R. R. There’s Petey Fisk, a one-man humane society, and Dixie Deberry, who threatens to turn out the lights on the Tuna Little Theater’s production of A Christmas Carol if they don’t pay the electricity bill, and Vera Carp, the town’s smutbuster, charged with eliminating the dirty words from that Dickens work. And let’s not forget fun-loving waitresses Inita Goodwin and Helen Bedd, who work down at the Tastee Kreme. And of course there’s Joe Bob Lipsey, directing the play but obviously much too good for this burg. And Aunt Pearl, a vision in blue with, well, the polite term is sagging breasts.

The plot, if that’s quite the word, hinges on Tuna’s annual Christmas home display contest, which Vera Carp has won for the past 15 years, and a Christmas phantom that just might change things this year.

It’s goofy and fun and often an absolute howl. There’s something endearing about old ladies who amuse themselves by killing bluejays with slingshots and a Baptist who gets into the punch and finds romance by pretending to be Methodist, at least for the night.

Special thanks go to costume designer Lisa Burgess for her amusing creations and to the seven dressers, prop people and backstage hands who make this show work.

Have a little eggnog and toddle on town to Tuna for a little Christmas cheer. You’ll leave in a better mood. I guarantee it.

A Tuna Christmas plays through Wednesday, Dec. 28, at Compass Theatre. Shows Wednesday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; matinees Saturday at 4 and Sunday at 2 p.m. For more information, visit www.gaylesbiantimes.com/links/1095.