Not that you have to listen to this Scrooge among scribblers. Conceived by Old Globe honcho Jack O'Brien, at whose San Diego theater it's in its 11th year, this stage adaptation of The Grinch broke Broadway box-office records in 2006 and 2007. And it is certainly an improvement on the 2000 Ron Howard film that starred Jim Carrey trying way too hard and saddled the Grinch with a Freudian backstory as well as a bad case of entertainment-industry elephantiasis.
Compared with that, the show on view at the Wang is a Japanese flower arrangement heavy on the holly. Moreover, towering Icelandic actor Stefán Karl's Grinch serves up a perfect plate of green ego and ham for the toddler set as he slithers down a neon-red proscenium in his green mange, brandishes his bristly fingers like knives, and makes the sort of rude noises and faces that delight small children. But for the most part, the musical is both tedious and cute, its saccharine Whos inexplicably costumed to look like ducks and waddling. Librettist/lyricist Timothy Mason's rhymes are inferior to Dr. Seuss's. And the generic score attached to the two Hague/Seuss songs by Mel Marvin smacks so much of Annie that sweet-spirited Cindy Lou Who and the suddenly sappy green hermit come to seem like the eponymous orphan and Daddy Warbucks turned the color of his cash.
Related:
Review: The Seussification of Romeo and Juliet, Play by play: July 17, 2009, Princesses, More 
- Review: The Seussification of Romeo and Juliet
For young love, kiss, and star-cross, you're hard-pressed to get/more quintessence than Romeo and Juliet...
- Play by play: July 17, 2009
Boston's theater schedule
- Princesses
Cinderella has been making her way around New England stages, and whether she had fairy or gold dust in her eyes depended on where you caught up with her.
- Doing the nasty
Ryan Landry swears that if there’s a more lavish musical extravaganza in town than his Cleopatra the Musical (at Machine through May 27), he’ll eat his negligee.
- Broken dreams
Proxy rhetorician of love Cyrano de Bergerac is drawn into a less romantic age in Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel , which beat out August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean for the American Theatre Critics Association’s Steinberg New Play Award, and is now in its area premiere at Merrimack Repertory Theatre.
- Mommie dearest
My dad used to tell a joke connecting the author of Medea to a pair of pants. The Italian-inflected punch line: “Euripides?” “You menda dese.”
- Not about heroes
Guns and cocoa butter are the subjects of George Bernard Shaw’s 1894 Arms and the Man , the first of the great Irish contrarian’s “Plays Pleasant.”
- Musical chairs
Perhaps only the team that triumphed with Ragtime would attempt a musical based on Sherley Anne Williams’s 1986 novel Dessa Rose .
- Take it outside
Okay, you like art, but you also want to get out and enjoy the great outdoors . Y ou can have your cake and eat it too at these outdoor sculpture parks. Summer Guide 2006: Cheap thrills from Bar Harbor to New Haven.
- Psycho Santa
Ryan Landry takes a holiday hatchet to The Silence of the Lambs in his latest outing for the Gold Dust Orphans, serving up Kris Kringle with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.
- Zone clone
The very thought of Ryan Landry doing The Twilight Zone is enough to bring a smile to the face.
- Less
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Theater
, Entertainment, Music, Chuck Jones, More
, Entertainment, Music, Chuck Jones, Jaime Martinez, Classical Music, Culture and Lifestyle, Holidays, Charlie Chaplin, Ryan Landry, Musicals, Less
