If you’re in danger of taking secular holiday traditions too seriously—if you find yourself getting teary at instrumental renditions of “Frosty the Snowman”—you might consider attending “Scrooge in Rouge: An English Music Hall Christmas Carol,“ the latest offering from Richmond Triangle Players. A rough-hewn but amusing ultra-campy spoof, directed by Shon M. Stacy, “Scrooge” sends up the classic tale “A Christmas Carol” with gleeful irreverence and more risqué double entendres than Tiny Tim could shake a crutch at. A soft-shoe number featuring Jacob Marley cheerfully twirling his ghostly chains? Charles Dickens must be turning over in his grave—and he could probably use a change of position.

Richmond Triangle Players may still be wandering in the desert as they wait for their new theater to be completed, but they’re right in home territory with Paul Rudnick’s “The New Century.“ The season opener, directed by John Knapp at HATTheatre in western Henrico County, is a laugh-a-minute bill of four short plays first presented together in New York last year, and it is hilarious.

Bootleg Shakespeare. A true story about a radium-poisoning scandal. A black comedy whose characters include a talking apartment and a ghostly Justin Timberlake. Those are some of the enticements that Richmond-area theaters will present in the 2009-10 season. Firehouse Theatre Project artistic director Carol Piersol might have been speaking for many company leaders when she said of her play-selection process, “I make a pile of plays that hit me in the gut - and then I try to get variety.“

There’s an energy crisis at the Gay Community Center, where Richmond Triangle Players’ “Pulp” is playing. This winking theatrical version of 1950s lesbian pulp novels should snap and crackle, but John Knapp’s production is more enervating than exhilarating. Patricia Kane’s 2004 musical (Kane wrote the lyrics; Amy Warren and Andre Pluess wrote the music) re-creates this underground literary genre with six characters and five actresses.

Imagine the temptation: An opportunity to stage the Christian-boy-band-spoof musical “Altar Boyz” in a beautiful church. And the devilish challenge: How to tame the huge, hard-surfaced, echoing sanctuary so the lyrics can be understood. Richmond Triangle Players can’t be faulted for any lack of pluck in giving this a go, but Philip Milone’s sound design is not quite equal to the acoustics of Metropolitan Community Church. And since the choice of “Altar Boyz” is both Triangle Players’ offering to the Acts of Faith Festival and a show requested by a large number of patrons, it’s unfortunate that many witty lyrics are inaudible. Maybe the sound design just needs a tweaking; lots can be understood, but the first couple lines of every song and every solo within songs were lost while the volume was adjusted.

Can two sets of “Altar Boyz” sing in harmony? The next few months will answer that question for the local theater community. Nearly four years after rocketing to small-scale hit status off-Broadway, “Altar Boyz,“ a tongue-in-cheek musical about a youthful, all-male Christian pop band, has finally reached the Richmond area. In fact, area audiences will have not one but two chances to sample the peppy piece in the near future: Richmond Triangle Players is mounting the first production, scheduled to run Jan. 28 through Feb. 21, as part of the annual Acts of Faith festival.