Ebenezer Scrooge (Bill Keevan) is resting up after his ghostly Christmas adventure when Cindy Lou Who (Tracy Perry) of How the Grinch Stole Christmas fame interrupts his slumber to deliver a crash course on the pasta-based metaphysics of the Who-universe in this surreal sci-fi mashup from the creators of last year’s surprisingly delightful What? The Dickens! The precocious moppet has escaped from the pages of Dr. Seuss’s storybook by stealing her Time Lord uncle’s TARDIS in order to right literary wrongs, beginning with rehabilitating Scrooge’s parsimonious reputation.

Writer-director Patrick Prainito has crafted another clever conceit — along with an eye-poppingly colorful set — and pop-culture nerds will find plenty of inside jokes to chuckle at. Abbott and Costello, Tom Baker, Melville Dewey and Schrödinger’s cat are all name-checked, alongside Harry Potter and Carmen Sandiego in this reference-stuffed script. Unfortunately, this overgrown SNL skit lost steam long before its last punchline.

While last year’s show was smart and snappy, this one plays like an obscure on-stage version of Big Bang Theory’s pandering geek-service, with the addition of pointed political pokes at anti-anti-vaxxers and the odd penis joke. Although I appreciated all the Douglas Adams allusions, the rebounding repartée between Scrooge and Cindy was rarely rapid enough for the dense wordplay to draw the intended laughs, with the actors’ focus growing increasingly erratic during the press preview as the elliptical dialogue dragged on. Hopefully this pair will know who’s on first by the time they open on Friday, but based on what I witnessed they’ve got a long week of work ahead of them.

Tickets and show info: Who! The Dickens?

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This article appears in May 11-17, 2022.