MARSHALL,Mich.–Artistic Director Randy Lake described the musical A Christmas Memory as “a gentle story of kind people in a simpler time” Friday night at Great Escape Stage Company.

Back by popular demand, it’s a perfect fit for audiences in Marshall, a town fully decked out in old-fashioned lit-up tinsel archways and nativity scenes up and down the main boulevards, complete with Christmas music blaring through speakers on lampposts throughout downtown.

Based on Truman Capote’s semi-autobiographical 1956 short story about a 7-year-old boy’s coming of age during the Depression in small-town Alabama, the musical is but one adaptation among an Emmy and Peabody-award winning TV show, then adapted for the big screen as part of a trilogy as well as a Hallmark made-for-TV movie. The story can be read several ways: as a sentimental Christmas story, as an origins story of one of the greatest American writers of the 20th Century, or as a combination of both.

Raised by eccentric cousins after his parents’ vitriolic divorce, Buddy spends most of his time with his best friend, Sook, the spinster cousin and old woman her sister describes as “an exception . . . to most any rule I can think of.” She encourages silly shenanigans such as their makeshift “Fun and Freak Museum” that featured a stereoscope and a three-legged chicken. They made $10 toward their annual fruitcake-making marathon, but the museum enterprise was cut short when the chicken up and died.

The fruitcakes they make and share with everyone from the local postman to Jean Harlowe and Franklin Delano Roosevelt are the organizing principle for the narrative and much of the music in this delightful little memory play that shifts in time through the perspective of the adult Buddy as narrator who’s returned home after finding success in the big city as a writer. It is deeply nostalgic and, indeed, about simpler times.

That simplicity is appropriately reflected in the show’s minimal yet impressively period-accurate design as well as the music. With accompaniment by Musical Director Elena Solero on piano with Alan Stulberg on electronic keyboard, the performance of the songs influenced by Ragtime, old show tunes, and perhaps even silent film scores, is so sweet and cozy, the show itself sometimes feels as if it’s taking place in someone’s parlor after a satisfying meal.

The cast of seven (eight, really, including the shockingly well-behaved little white terrier who spends time on stage among fruitcake ingredients in a wicker baby buggy) convincingly creates this loving little community and genuine connections with each other and the audience. Despite a few dropped lyrics, a rough start in terms of timing, and inconsistent at best Deep South accents and rhythm, they make this wonderful story work and the performance builds in strength over the course of the two-and-a-half hour show including intermission.

Debbie Culver is a warm and spirited Sook whose love for the child Buddy, played nicely by Grant Rupp, who’s impressively stretching his boundaries with this role, is palpable. Carlen Kernish plays the adult Buddy narrator gracefully, with just the right touch of nostalgia; and his singing is lovely. Mackenna Groeneveld is wonderful as Nelle Harper, the tomboy in the treehouse next door, Buddy’s “enemy in life” who is tougher and smarter than all the boys. Of the cast, she masters an Alabama drawl the best, and she and Rupp are terrific together. It’s also delightful to imagine the well-documented lifelong partnership between Capote and Harper Lee as having these intimate yet truculent beginnings.

The finest singers here are Elinor Marsh as Jennie Faulk and Marquetta Frost as Anna Stabler, each of whom, unfortunately, only has one solo. But they provide powerful punctuation amid a sea of sentimental ballads and playful ditties.

And Timothy Lake’s portrayal of the various town characters, including the hypochondriac cousin, the gossiping postman, and the local bootlegger, is sheer joy. His energy and range are admirable, and he plays crucial moments for laughs without upstaging the rest of the action.

The light humor, moments of irreverence, and little Southern witticisms and wisdom sprinkled throughout, such as “you don’t appreciate a thing unless you work for it” and explaining bad behavior with “maybe her mama just didn’t raise her right” are but examples of the fine writing that keeps the sweetness of this story from turning saccharine.

It’s the kind of simple, down-home show Great Escape and Director Randy Lake does best, and “A Christmas Memory” offers such fine, feel-good storytelling, it’s perfectly pleasant holiday entertainment for this particular time and place.

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