GLASGOW – While actors are used to working with numerous others to make sure a production comes together, the Far Off Broadway Players’ upcoming musical puts almost all the weight on the shoulders of just two people.

Paul Glodfelter, the Players’ creative director and one of two actors featured in “Another Night Before Christmas,” which opens Friday, said a production is more difficult when it depends mainly on two actors.

“The fact that it’s just two people is a huge challenge because we carry it. We have to make sure what we’re doing is engaging enough that the audience stays with us,” he said. “We don’t have somebody walking in here or walking in there to kind of color it up a little bit. It’s just the two of us.”

The show features 11 musical numbers, most of them duets, which is far more songs than a typical musical provides any actor, Glodfelter said.

“Usually you do a musical and you do one, maybe two songs. If you’re in the ensemble, you maybe do three. This, we do them all,” he said.

“Another Night Before Christmas” follows the story of Karol, a 30-something social worker who meets Santa Claus, who she thinks is a homeless man, in a park on Christmas Eve. Later, Santa makes an appearance at her apartment. From then on, through both spoken dialogue and song and dance numbers, the two of them discuss Karol’s disillusionment with Christmas.

“For the next hour and 45 minutes, he tries to convince her that he is Santa Claus and tries to explain to her why she feels the way she does about it,” Glodfelter said. “It’s a really lovely, lovely Christmas story and it’s also really, really funny if we do our job right.”

After the Players’ final performance of “Dracula” on Oct. 21, Glodfelter immediately got to work on preparing “Another Night Before Christmas,” which he is also producing.

“I played this role before for a theater in Florida and when we were looking for a Christmas play, I said, ‘Hey, I’ve got just the one.’ We were looking for something that wouldn’t take that long to put up,” he said. “A full-blown musical takes months to put up and we didn’t have that long. We had about five to six weeks so it’s been a very fast process, ending ‘Dracula,’ starting this one.”

Since the Players’ run of “Dracula” ended, the cast and crew have been meeting several times a week to prepare for the live performances Dec. 7, 8 and 9.

Though it hasn’t been terribly difficult for Glodfelter to familiarize himself with the material again, it was different for the theater’s technical crew and Glodfelter’s co-star, Ruby Sayard Kelly.

“It’s easy for me, because I did the show before, so it didn’t take me that long to learn my lines and reacquaint myself with the music, but everybody else had to … learn it fresh,” he said.

Throughout a rehearsal Wednesday night, Temple Dickinson, the musical’s director, watched Glodfelter and Kelly run through the entire show, taking occasional notes.

Though Glodfelter, a professional actor who’s worked on stages all over the country, is producing the show, he brought in Dickinson, a veteran of numerous Players productions, to serve as an extra set of eyes and ears to coordinate the show.

“You need somebody looking in from the outside to say ‘This is too slow, this is too fast,’ ” Dickinson said. “They haven’t needed a lot of direction, really. Everything’s instinctive and those instincts have been right.”

Kelly, a veteran of numerous local theater productions, said the pace of the rehearsals is quicker than what she’s used to and the scope of material much larger.

“It’s very demanding,” she said. “There’s a lot of dialogue, a lot of lines to learn, and of course this is a musical and there’s only two people singing the songs, so it can be demanding on your voice as well.”

Glodfelter likened the character of Karol to a grown-up version of the little girl in “Miracle on 34th Street” who doesn’t believe in Santa, and Kelly had a similar interpretation.

“She appears to have everything together on the outside, but there’s something missing in her life and she seems to be a little, not necessarily really sad, but just something’s missing and she’s definitely cynical when it comes to the holidays,” she said.

Kelly said she’s been interested in acting as a child, though she wasn’t given many opportunities to try it when she was growing up.

“I come from a very small town. I had a school play, I think, in fifth grade and another one in eighth grade. That was it. That was my only outlet as far as theater goes,” she said.

In college, Kelly worked toward a performing arts major, though she ultimately received a psychology degree.

After college, she pursued acting in her down time, participating in productions with local theater groups like the Barn Lot Theater in Edmonton and the now-defunct Glasgow Summer Theater.

“After I graduated college, I started getting back into it via community theater,” she said.

Kelly said she wanted to return to theater because of the art form’s tendency to introduce practitioners and spectators alike to new ideas.

“When you’re involved in theater and when you, even as a patron, just go to see the arts, when you see theater, you’re exposed to so many types of people and cultures and I think it really helps round out who you are as a human being, helps you develop empathy and of course that’s just the humanitarian aspect of it,” she said.

The Players will be performing the show at 7 p.m. Friday, at 1 p.m. and 7 p.m. Dec. 8 and at 3 p.m. Dec. 9. Tickets are available for $10 at historicplaza.com. There will be a school matinee at 9 a.m. Friday with $5 student and teacher admission, according to the Plaza’s website.