Every Seussical story is family friendly a lot.

“Who’s Holiday!,” inspired by the Grinch, most certainly is not.

Millennial Theatre Company will stage the adults-only comedy for a three-performance run this weekend at Hopewell Theatre in Youngstown.

The play by Matthew Lombardo is a departure from what MTC normally does. It has built a reputation for quality musical theater, both in big houses like the Youngstown Playhouse and by making big musicals work in an intimate space like Hopewell.

“This is the first play I’ve ever directed,” said Joe Asente, who has far more experience corralling dozens of singers and dancers than he does working with a single performer.

“Who’s Holiday” is a show he wanted to do since he saw a livestream production during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I just thought it was one of the most hilarious shows I’ve ever seen, and it was something that I’d never seen anything like before,” he said. “We talked about it for a few years. It takes a lot for us to make the pivot from musical to play. We definitely prefer to live in the world of musicals. That was a bit of a jump for us.

“Obviously, with it being a one-person show, we needed someone to be the vehicle to drive this play forward. And as soon as I met Brandy (Johanntges) during auditions for ‘Sweeney Todd’ and spent any amount of time with her, I realized that she was the person to do this. As soon as she agreed to do it, we added it to our schedule.”

Johanntges plays Cindy Lou, the innocent little girl who was no more than two who interrupts the Grinch’s attempt to steal Christmas in the Dr. Seuss book, which inspired a beloved 1966 animated holiday special and two feature films.

However, 30-some years after that eventful Christmas Eve, Cindy now lives in a trailer at the foot of Mt. Crumpit and shares the tale of the series of bad decisions that led to her current predicament.

And playwright Lombardo writes all of the dialogue in the rhyming style of Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss).

“The first half kind of walks you through what happened in between Cindy Lou Who’s second or third Christmas and her 18th birthday, then the second half take you from her 18th birthday through the present, and there are many twists and turns to see how Cindy Lou Who ended up to be the person she is today,” Asente said.

Asente enjoys working collaboratively, and the show allows a level of collaboration that is impossible with a larger cast.

“Brandy and I have a really great working relationship from doing both ‘Spamalot’ and ‘Sweeney Todd’ in the last year,” he said. “We bounce ideas off each other really well. Brandy has done a one-woman show before, so I kind of relied on her to kind of lead the way through this production in terms of what is most beneficial to her and her process as she’s been learning this. We kind of jointly developed everything from the beginning, including the schedule and how rehearsals were formatted, since everything ultimately rests on her shoulders.

“That’s something that’s been new and challenging in this process. Additionally, I feel like working with someone as seasoned as Brandy, doing something like this, and only having one person to focus on makes my job really easy in a way as well, because I just get to sit back and watch her riff off this material night after night. Sometimes I feel like I’m not doing my job because I don’t have pages full of notes like I usually would in a musical at the end of the night, but that’s just the brilliance of Brandy Johanntges.”

If you go …

WHAT: Millennial Theatre Company — “Who’s Holiday!”

WHEN: 7:30 p.m. today and Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday

WHERE: Hopewell Theatre, 702 Mahoning Ave., Youngstown

HOW MUCH: Tickets are $20 and are available online at millennialtheatre.org/tickets