Christmastime brings with it a cavalcade of holiday figureheads: Jesus Christ, Santa Claus, Ebenezer Scrooge, the Heat Miser.

But who comes with Hanukkah?

If you’re going by Arizona Jewish Theatre’s holiday season offering — a repertory of James Sherman’s situation comedy “Beau Jest” and its sequel, “Jest a Second” — the Hanukkah mascot might as well be one of the most unconvincing drag queens this side of Hamburger Mary’s.

That’s Christopher Williams underneath the bad wig and garish gown suggesting the coal miner’s daughter has raided the closet of “The Golden Girls.” But don’t worry, folks, he’s an actor playing an actor. In both “Jests,” Williams is Bob, a struggling thespian. In “Beau Jest,” he’s earning extra money as an escort when he is hired by pretty young Sarah Goldman (Natalie Messersmith) to play her Jewish boyfriend — a successful Jewish doctor — in front of her stereotypically overbearing parents. The only catch: Bob’s not Jewish. Thank the Torah he played in a touring production of “Fiddler on the Roof.”

By “Jest a Second,” Bob is no longer a faux beau; he has married Sarah and converted to full-blown orthodoxy. Now, with the comedy turned up all the way to contrived farce, Bob must help his closeted gay brother-in-law, Joel (Dominik Rebilas), hide his homosexuality in front of Joel’s parents — by, get this, playing his girlfriend. Hence Williams in drag.
The shows are a collective comedy piffle, which is apropos considering most Jews will probably tell you Hanukkah isn’t the weightiest of holidays. (The biggie’s Passover.) Compared to the staid “Christmas Carols” and prim “Nutcrackers” dotting the theatrical landscape of late, these “Jests” are practically filled with helium.

What anchors such airy convolutions are the pedigrees of the local performers. Williams is a rising Equity talent with credits such as Actors Theatre’s “Angels in America” under his belt; Messersmith is a Valley professional thespo with a wicked-good Maggie the Cat (Actors Theatre’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” last season) in her back pocket. The cherry on top: directing done by the Valley’s expat king of comedy, Bob Sorenson.

Nobody’s slumming it here, mind you, even if the source material — especially “Jest a Second” — is too silly to take very seriously. The actors are in fine form, from Benjamin Stewart’s deadpan take on the tired, defeated retiree who cares about little more than how long it takes to park the car, all the way to Chris Mascarelli, a bit player in “Beau Jest” who emerges with a Frankie Goes to Hollywood moustache to play Joel’s lover in “Jest a Second.” Audience members can shut off their brains and roll with the chuckles, but thankfully the actors have chosen not to.

That said, for such a smoothly enjoyable pair of productions, they hit an awkward snag. Messersmith is too cold as Sarah, too seemingly disconnected from any interesting personality within the character (which she’d have to ferret out herself, since Sherman offers little help in the script) for us to sympathize with her or her relationship with Bob. In “Jest a Second’s” first act, Sarah’s got a pregnant belly for Messersmith to act around — and, by golly, she acts that pregnancy to the hilt — but by then we’ve come to feel that Williams’ character, the actor Bob, whose parents have both died, is less in love with Sarah than he is with her family.