Stage Left Players keep bell on the door jingling

Thanks to strong word-of-mouth, “Jingle My Bell” had an excellent box office last year when Stage Left Players premiered the homegrown musical.

So SLP has revived the bouncy and hilarious holiday romp, with the entire cast intact. It’s in the middle of a three-weekend run at the company’s Trinity Playhouse in downtown Lisbon, and it’s a good reason to make the drive down Route 11 — and back in time.

The good-timey piece was written and directed by Stage Left stalwart Kandace Cleland, who also plays a role. She is not only the resident artistic director and president of the board of SLP, but also the drama teacher at Canfield Village Middle School and the director of the fall play at Canfield High the past two years.

Stage Left Players was founded 19 years ago by Cleland, who never imagined that it would blossom into the thriving theater it has become.

In its early days, before it had its own home, SLP traveled to different venues, including the Kent-Salem campus and even the back of Atty. Eric Kibler’s law building in Lisbon.

When the two Presbyterian congregations in the historic town merged and began meet-ing in the larger of the two buildings, Cleland asked if SLP could stage productions in the now-empty Trinity Church on East Lincoln Way — the main drag. The congregation agreed, and SLP used the building rent-free from 1998 to 2007, when it purchased the building.

The old, brick church didn’t require a whole lot of retrofitting to turn it into a theater. It has rows of well-padded and slightly reclined pews that slope downward to the stage, allowing for perfect sight lines. The seating area curves in quarter-round fashion around the stage, with aisles down the center and the sides.

As is typical for a church, the interior is finished in wood and has a high ceiling, creating a space that is warm but roomy.

As for the show: “Jingle” takes place in a diner in the ’50s, a simpler and more innocent time (or at least that’s how we like to think of it).

Scenic designers Craig Snay and Ali Cleland (Kandace’s daughter) capture the era’s look with pink and green walls with checkerboard trim, colorful vinyl and chrome chairs, and a cheerfully glowing jukebox. The waitress uniforms are the icing on the cake.

Those waitresses — Kari Lankford, Allison Dolphin and both Clelands — as well as a bread-truck driver, bus driver, the cook and his son, break into songs adapted from the Andrews Sisters and others at regular intervals.

The signature tune (“Jingle My Bell”) uses explanatory lyrics to introduce the characters and get the audience up to speed, much like an old sitcom theme song. Cleland wrote the lyrics to go with Glenn Miller’s “Jukebox Saturday Night,” and it was arranged by musical director Jodine Pilmer.

The lightweight tale breezes by in 90 minutes —dialog-wise, it’s not exactly David Mamet — leaving plenty of time to hit up the Steel Wheel Trolley, the old-school diner down the street that probably inspired Cleland.

“Jingle My Bell” gets off to a pleasant start, with an opening act that is unapologetically shmaltzy, sentimental and silly, and (at least on opening night) not as exuberant as expected. But it thankfully goes bonkers in the second half, earning “Jingle” its buzz.

That’s when Floyd Knickerbocker, evil health inspector, barges in. The villainous cad is played melodramatically by SLP regular Reed Worth, who is studying theater at Point Park University in Pittsburgh. The lanky Worth is utterly hilarious as the nerdy-but-arrogant inspector who has an ax to grind.

Several numbers that focus on the inspector as well as waitress Agnes (played with small-town spirit by charming Ali Cleland) are screamingly nutso. You will never think of Polynesian fire dancers — or Riverdance — the same.

Ali, a recent musical-theater graduate from East Carolina University, plans to pursue a stage career in operetta.

Nathan Kuhne plays the gee-whiz bread man who conveys his attraction to Agnes with every muscle. Scenes involving flirtatious bus driver Bob call for over-the-top hamminess, and Dave Bedell gleefully complies. Vince Ward plays Dave, the cook and diner owner, and Jacob Ward is his son, Corky.

For show times and reservations, call Stage Left at 330-831-7249, or go to stageleftplayers.org.