New comedic play reconfigures "A Christmas Carol" with Stephen Hawking as Tiny Tim

From the Los Angeles Times review:

The very title of Overtone Industries’ "It’s a Pretty Good Life" may be an implicit plea for lowered expectations — but not low enough, unfortunately. This freewheeling Christmas comedy with songs brings together some major talents from L.A.’s fringe performing arts scene, with disappointingly minor results.

Conceived by Kathleen Cramer, O-Lan Jones and Andrea Stein as a parody of artistic pretension and concessions to mass-market appetites, the piece revolves around the efforts of a trio of female would-be stage impresarios who decide to produce an alternative version of "A Christmas Carol."

Among the obstacles facing the Three Wise Babes (Jones, Molly Bryant and Martha Gehman): They arrive at their rented venue without a script, props or even a cast. "We’re supposed to do a play," declares Jones. "That’s the fly in the ointment as I see it."

Indeed it is. After wrestling with some internal conflicts and engaging in some loosely associative metaphysical banter, they hold their first auditions — on opening night. Wayne (Eric B. Anthony), a sunny tap-dancer, is cast as Scrooge. For Tiny Tim, the Babes choose a wheelchair-bound theoretical physicist named Screamin’ Stephen J. Hawkings — get it? — played with Katharine Hepburn-esque palsied vibrato by John Fleck (pictured). Amping up the satire as he’s wheeled around by his eye-candy nurse (Ali Tobia), Hawkings out-of-tunefully riffs on the equation of stardom with thermonuclear reactions in the formation of black holes. For no apparent reason, the Babes switch the roles of Wayne and Hawkings, who literally rises to the occasion by leaping from his wheelchair.

OK, so continuity and coherence are off the table here. But the fundamental rule in parody is that you have to be better than your target, and here the piece suffers from way too much of the pretentious self-indulgence it ridicules. Tony Abatemarco’s staging offers some fleeting pleasures in Fleck’s hamming his way through an abbreviated version of the Scrooge story, but the play-within-a-play doesn’t even start until an hour in.