Snowed Under
A new Christmas show succeeds with satire.
New Christmas shows struggle against the enduring popularity of A Christmas Carol; some merely repeat or reinvent it, while a few succeed by satirizing it. The Act II Playhouse's area premiere of Every Christmas Story Ever Told — written by the Cape May Stage creative team of Michael Carleton, John Alvarez, and Jim Fitzgerald — borrows the format the Reduced Shakespeare Company uses on the Bard, the Bible and American history, to assemble pastiches of ... well, the title says it all.
Lenny Haas wants to recite A Christmas Carol aside a roaring fire, Matt Pfeiffer believes in holiday magic and Nathan Holt comes up with the idea to replace Dickens with all the great Christmas stories ever told — on television. American BHCs (Beloved Holiday Classics) arrive not through books, plays or carols, but in the specials repeated year after year on TV.
Director Peter Pryor's frenetic production matches the script's cleverness, but sags because it's so clearly just pushing our memory buttons with quick images — the Grinch, Charlie Brown, the claymation Rudolph (disguised "for copyright reasons" as a "green-nosed rein-goat"). Brief comic gems — a Donner Pass cannibalism joke, Santa's makeover by "Queer Eye for the Sleigh Guy," the elves' lament that they "don't get paid, can't get laid, drown ourselves in booze" — are bogged down by tired spoofs like "What's the deal with fruitcake?" And where's that modern BHC, A Christmas Story?!
A brief stab at "The Gift of the Magi" and an inspired bit twisting Dylan Thomas into a seafaring Bob Dylan, "A Child's Christmas with Whales," lead to a superb finale: Haas is finally allowed his Christmas Carol, but the guys mesh Dickens with It's A Wonderful Life. Haas alternates between Scrooge and George Bailey, with Pfeiffer playing all the other Wonderful Life characters while Holt provides all of Dickens'.
Pryor's production has a makeshift feel: Melissa Guyer's blandly hand-drawn backdrop hangs through the whole show to set up one unsuccessful gag repeated three times, and James Leitner's lighting is uncharacteristically generic, though William Pollock's costume pieces conjure source material convincingly.
We're won over, ultimately, by the performers' sincere enthusiasm, even though their caricatures are established one-dimensionally. They work so hard to remind us of all the stories we know already that we can't help but appreciate their labors. Every Christmas Story Ever Told is not so much a play as a punnish placeholder for the next great television BHC.
Every Christmas Story Ever Told
Through Dec. 17, Act II Playhouse, 56 E. Butler Ave., Ambler, 215-654-0200, www.act2.org.
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