Starrlet O’Hara has called several theaters home since “How the Drag Queen Stole Queen Stole Christmas” made its debut 19 years ago at the former Oakland Center for the Arts in downtown Youngstown.

Rust Belt Theater Company founder Robert Dennick Joki brings the show to a new space in a former venue for 2025 as the non-traditional holiday show opens Friday at Youngstown Playhouse’s Moyer Room for a six-performance run.

“This is the best I’ve felt about the show since it was at the Oakland,” Joki said. “It’s just the kind of space that I wrote the show for, which is more intimate. But we have better tech in the Moyer room than we ever had at Club Switch or when we were at the Calvin Center, because it’s set up as a more intimate theater.”

However, the smaller venue means that 85% of the tickets already were sold by the beginning of this week.

Last year the show was on the Playhouse’s main stage for one weekend and Club Switch for the other, which required staging the musical in two radically different venues.

“When I’m on a big stage, like with the proscenium and there’s that huge gap between me and the audience, it’s not the same,” Joki said. “I’m just not as comfortable doing the show unless I’m up close and personal with the audience. The last few years have been strange because we’ve done it in a big space that seats like 500 people, and then we’ve done it in a space that seats about 80 people. The dynamic is so different that it throws the performers a little bit. So I’m excited this year that it’s all taking place in the same space, and it’s the kind of space that I like to do the show.”

“How the Drag Queen Stole Christmas” is a riff on Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” as a pill-popping drag queen / club owner fires all of her performers on Christmas Eve and is visited by three ghostly spirits. It’s a show filled with bawdy musical numbers and plenty of local references.

Joki, 46, was in his 20s when he started playing O’Hara. Now he’s close to the age he imagined Starrlet to be when he wrote the script. The realization came while watching the 2019 BBC version of “A Christmas Carol,” which delves more into Scrooge’s backstory.

“There’s a quote from his sister that says, ‘Try to forgive my brother. He’s in pain, and it’s a very old pain.’ It occurred to me that that’s very much what this character is like. We talk so much about her early life and the trauma that affected her and caused her to close herself off to the world and close herself off to personal relationships. And the show ends up being about her finding the Christmas spirit again, finding a place in her heart to allow other people to become close to her. And that’s something that as you get older, I think that you start to appreciate.”

In addition to Joki, the cast features Nicole Zayas, Caitlyn Murphy, Vicci Sfikas, Diane Marie, Haley Kerr, Rachael Kerr, Lisa Torrence, Caitlyn Santiago, Joey Shilot, Charity Bauer, Carlos Rivera, Keith Stepanic, Eric McCrea, Caitlin Cole and Rachel Myers.

There are no new songs or major changes in the script, but the show will have a different look in 2025. That wasn’t planned.

“Last spring, we had to put everything in storage (after Club Switch closed in a landlord-tenant dispute),” Joki said. “When we went to get it out of storage, at some point some of it got wet and was covered in mold and had to be thrown away. Some of those costumes have been in the show since the very first year, and there was just no saving them. That was sad, but it’s probably about time for some of them to be refreshed anyway.”

Joki does tweak the script to reflect events from the past year, and those events also influenced some of the things that will be done surrounding this year’s production.

Each performance will showcase a different organization that serves the LGBTQ+ community: New Castle Prism Initiative on Friday, Greater Mahoning Valley LGBTQ+ Community Needs Assessment on Saturday, Columbiana County Pride on Sunday, Rae’s Safe Haven on Dec. 12, Full Spectrum Community Outreach on Dec. 13 and Pride Youngstown on Dec. 14. They will have information tables set up in the lobby and representatives will speak at intermission.

“All are organizations I’ve volunteered for in the last few years, and they’re all struggling this year,” Joki said. “The funding just has not been there, and a lot of it is due to DEI rollbacks. The corporate funding especially has been lacking this year. For example, Full Spectrum Community Outreach is the one that I work with the most. When we went to mount Pride in the Valley last year (in downtown Warren), we were operating with a budget that was around 50% of what we usually have going into it.

“Because this is our biggest show and the one that we get the biggest audiences for, it would be nice to show people that these are organizations that work for the community all year long, and they need support all year long. All of them, in the last month, have focused primarily on feeding people, which is something that is very near to my heart, growing up poor and growing up with a family that didn’t always have the money for utilities or even to put food on the table. Doing food drives and donating Thanksgiving dinners to people, these organizations are doing good in your community right in front of your face.”

If you go …

WHAT: Rust Belt Theater Company — “How the Drag Queen Stole Christmas”

WHEN: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday through Dec. 14

WHERE: Moyer Room, Youngstown Playhouse, 600 Playhouse Lane, Youngstown

HOW MUCH: Tickets are $20 and are available online at experienceyourarts.org and by calling 330-259-9651.