he Skylight has had its holiday hits, but it has never found its reliable "Christmas Carol" or "Nutcracker." Broadway has never produced such a thing.

So the Skylight has filled the vacuum, over the decades, by confecting its own revues, trying out shows developed in other regional theaters (the leaky "Christmas Schooner" comes to mind) and by programming contrary to holiday cheer (the cynical "Chicago" was a huge hit).

The Skylight might have found its Christmas perennial in "Irving Berlin's White Christmas," which is coming to town tonight through New Year's Eve.

Where did it come from? The story begins in 1937.

Berlin was in Los Angeles working on a film, "Alexander's Ragtime Band." Stuck there for the holidays and nostalgic for family and wintry weather, Berlin worked on an idea he had for a Broadway holiday revue. Philip Furia and Michael Lassiter, in their book "America's Songs," write that Berlin imagined a group of L.A. sophisticates singing mournfully of the snowy Christmases of their childhoods in snowbelt states.

By all accounts, "White Christmas" came from Berlin's heart. Although he was a Jewish New Yorker, Berlin had loved Christmas since he was a boy and celebrated naively with the Irish family across the street.

The song went nowhere until 1941, when Paramount Pictures bit on Berlin's revue idea. It became "Holiday Inn," a vehicle for Paramount star Bing Crosby. It was released in 1942, with Fred Astaire as co-star.

"White Christmas" won the Oscar for best song and became a hit record for Crosby. The song spoke powerfully to GIs stationed far from home during the darkest days of World War II, especially those in the South Pacific. Crosby's "White Christmas" was the bestselling record of all time until Elton John's "Candle in the Wind" topped it in 1998. (Go figure.)

Reconfiguring a classic

The secular carol was an established Christmas classic by 1954, when Paramount was ready to launch VistaVision, its new widescreen, brilliantly colored film format. Paramount and Berlin agreed on a new musical that would recast both the song and Crosby in a postwar context. They called it "Irving Berlin's 'White Christmas.' " By a wide margin, it became the biggest box-office hit of 1954.

Berlin had a strong hand in working out the plot. Two old army buddies, Phil and Bob, become a famous song-and-dance team after the war. Crosby played Bob; Danny Kaye played Phil. They become involved with an up-and-coming sister act, Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen as Betty and Judy Haynes. The boys follow the girls to a Vermont ski lodge, where the sisters have a ski-season gig.

The kindly owner happens to be the boys' beloved former commanding general - an underwritten role that the late, great Dean Jagger somehow brought to life. Gen. Waverly is losing his entire investment because warm, dry weather is killing the Vermont ski season. Bob, Phil and the Haynes sisters decide to save the day by (you guessed it) putting on a big show at the lodge.

Romantic high jinks and near-tragic misunderstandings ensue. At the end, of course, the right couples are coupled, the lodge is saved, and snow wafts down to cover the slopes as everyone sings a climactic "White Christmas."

From screen to stage

Fast-forward to the new millennium.

The Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization, which owns the rights to the Berlin catalog, commissions David Ives and Paul Blake to rework "White Christmas" for the stage. They do, with some judicious cuts and a healthy addition of numbers from the Berlin songbook.

By 2002, RHO has organized its own "White Christmas" companies, which sit down in two or three different cities for holiday runs each year. The Skylight persuaded RHO to allow it to stage its own production of the Ives/Blake treatment.

Bill Theisen, the Skylight's artistic director, is thrilled that his company could get the rights.

"You don't find many new Irving Berlin musicals," Theisen said, in announcing the show last spring.

The Skylight's "White Christmas" has a strong Milwaukee touch. The company brought in designer Rick Rasmussen and built its own sets. Skylight veterans Branch Woodman and Norman Moses will play Phil and Bob. (Melinda Pufndstein, who's acted for the Milwaukee Rep, and Rebekah Jacobs of Connecticut, make their Skylight debuts as Betty and Judy.) Former Skylight artistic director Richard Carsey will conduct. The director-choreographer is Milwaukeean Pam Kriger.

Kriger said the stage version streamlines the show. Instead of a half-dozen different nightclubs, the stage show has one. Ives and Blake skip the tedious montage of the boys building their postwar careers. And the guys meet the girls in New York, not Miami.

The song "Let Yourself Go," barely noticed in the movie, becomes a big production number. By the way, Berlin wrote just a few new songs - "Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep," "Sisters" and "The Best Things Happen When You're Dancing" - for the 1954 film. The rest - "Blue Skies," "Mandy," and so on - were vintage Berlin even in 1954.

Ives and Blake added "Happy Holiday," which was in the 1942 "Holiday Inn" but not the 1954 "White Christmas." "I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm" was another no-brainer. They also worked in: "Let Me Sing and I'm Happy," "I Love a Piano," "Love and the Weather," "Love You Didn't Do Right by Me" and "How Deep Is the Ocean?"

Plot holes, but heart, too

Dance is important in the movie - Vera-Ellen was a superb dancer, and Kaye wasn't bad. The terrific John Brascia subbed for Kaye as Vera-Ellen's partner when Robert Alton's choreography was too ambitious. Kriger, the Skylight's choreographer as well as director, is not reproducing Alton's numbers.

"I'm thinking June Taylor Dancers, the kind of thing you saw on TV variety shows in the 1950s," Kriger said. "Tap was still in; it didn't go out until the '60s. But it had a jazz feel, with more movement in the shoulders and a more supple body."

Ives and Blake eliminated two 1954 clunkers: a minstrel show segment that is almost as embarrassing as Bing in blackface in the Lincoln's birthday bit in "Holiday Inn"; and "Choreography," Danny Kaye's excruciating and obscure satire of Martha Graham's modern dance.

They did little, though, to fix the movie's weird warping of time, distance and space. In the movie and on stage, the intimate ski lodge somehow becomes big enough to house a show the size of the Ziegfeld Follies. The film also would have us believe that Betty could leave Vermont in a snit on the morning of Christmas Eve, get to New York on the train, rehearse a show with four chorus boys at the Carousel Club and put it on that evening. Meanwhile, Bob follows her to New York, sees her show, argues with her, and dashes off to appear on "The Ed Sullivan Show" ("Ed Harrison" in the movie). On the air, he urges his entire old Army outfit to come to Vermont that night to help the general. He gets back to Vermont in time to put on the show before hundreds of ex-GIs in full uniform.

"There are all kinds of holes in the story," Kriger admitted. "You just have to forgive them. You have to say, 'OK, they're not trying to be realistic. They're trying to show what happens when someone goes the extra mile to help someone and sees it through to the end.' You have to be engaged with the love story, and the love story works because of what Bob does for the general. If Bob didn't do that, Betty wouldn't give him two looks.

"It's so touching when the soldiers all stand and sing for the general. The important thing is the spirit of the show. It's got a lot of heart."