Returning productions — Holiday season 2011

Novemer and December in the theater world signals the return of favorite Christmas productions for all ages. As the Rogue has her hands overfull with new plays, holiday and otherwise, here’s a round-up of shows that played to audience and critical acclaim in previous years and return in 2011 to delight audiences anew.

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Every Christmas Story Ever Told (And Then Some!)

For viewers who can’t choose just one Christmas classic, there’s Every Christmas Story Ever Told (And Then Some!) (by Michael Carleton, Jim Fitzgerald, and John K. Alvarez). As presented by young company The AKT Theatre Project, with direction by Angie Kane Ferrante, this whirlwind tour plugs directly into the mainframe of favorite Christmas culture and media, in an exhaustive visual smorgasbord of holiday greatest hits. Dwelling in lightness and peppered with self-effacing humor, the result is a hyper-manic experience that feels like all of Christmas flashing before one’s eyes.

In a quick setup/premise maneuver, traditional Jon Pigott’s insistence on yet again performing A Christmas Carol is overruled by compatriots Jeremy St. Martin and Jack Hundley, who open the floor to suggestions for favorite Christmas traditions, movies and TV specials, and stories. What follows is a cavalcade of beloved holiday classics, as well as a handful of bumpers, including descriptions of worldwide Christmas lore that clash disturbingly with America’s jolly consumer paradise. No holiday favorite is sacred, be it a copyrighted ninth reindeer or a magically animate snowman or the mathematically improbable feats of jolly old St. Nicholas himself, and it becomes clear how deeply ingrained these stories are when a single moment or visual communicates the thing as a whole, or when two of the best-known tales are mashed together in a second act lightning round. Hundley, Pigott, and St. Martin are tireless in their pursuits and entirely willing to make fools of themselves as the occasion warrants; rarely does a moment pass in which there isn’t something new and elaborately goofy to take in.

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A Jazzy Christmas

‘Tis the season for ubiquitous Christmas music, the beastly quantity and dubious quality of which is enough to wear on even the most spirited holiday shopper (and driver, and diner, and dental patient, and person on hold). Fortunately, Plowshares Theatre understands that the best cure for the unfortunate-Christmas-recordings blues is to do the tunes right. As a follow-up to its spring production, Jazz: Birth of the Cool, the company returns to Detroit’s Virgil H. Carr Cultural Center to celebrate A Jazzy Christmas with inviting warmth and seasonal style.

The large second-floor space is here configured with rows of chairs facing a temporary stage, from which the performers frequently step down and sing almost within reach of the front row. It’s an intimate, casual atmosphere that both evades a strictly concert feel and lends flexibility to performer/choreographer Brent Davin Vance’s staging of about three dozen numbers presented in two acts. LED lighting effects set the ladies’ luxe formal wear to sparkling and also wash over the blank backdrop with rich primary colors, supplemented by huge snowflake lights that keep the surroundings dynamic without being overly busy. The sound design has a similarly tech-infused feel, providing personal amplification that puts each of the five singers on even footing with the five musicians arraying the rear of the stage. Although the impressive accoutrements and close feel suggest counterintuitive purposes, the overall effect is coherent enough: a glimmering, jubilant, but highly personal experience.

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Silent Night of the Lambs

With a never-ending preponderance of comfort and joy this time of year, there’s always an underrepresented legion of the overwhelmed and over it. It’s to this population that Who Wants Cake? reaches out this holiday season with its hybrid Christmas suspense tale, Silent Night of the Lambs (by Ryan Landry). In essence a powerhouse thriller relocated to the North Pole, this Joe Plambeck–directed comedy delivers both greedily anticipated and unexpected notes of campy ho-ho-horror.

The story of The Silence of the Lambs is well preserved in this adaptation. In this world, the North Pole is policed by a fierce reindeer CIA, in which legacy Clarice Starling (Melissa Beckwith) is a green but promising up and comer. When a series of horrific murders breaks out, pushy Lt. Blitzen (Anne Faba) recruits Clarice to interview a disgraced and incarcerated Santa Claus (Dave Davies), in an effort to work every angle of the case. Concurrent stories push the action forward: even as vulnerable Clarice and demented Santa’s dangerously fruitful partnership points the good guys closer to the culprit, the monstrous, transformational killer has acquired the daughter of a hugely famous and influential name in holiday shopping, and the young woman’s life hangs in the balance.

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The Sunday Punch

Very rarely does a play reside solely in the dramatic or the comedic realm; our world — the one upon which playwrights base their staged realities — is never so binary. In The Sunday Punch, playwright Linda Ramsay-Detherage pours dramatic heft into a comedic premise, establishing a goofy story about one man’s crisis of masculinity and then veering into a deeper meditation on parenting and growing up. In the world premiere production at Planet Ant Theatre, director Nancy Kammer attempts the daunting task of merging these contradictory approaches, and the result shakily straddles the different worlds as it unearths successes in unexpected places.

The play begins with a scene that would be right at home in a sitcom: Gordon (Eric Bloch) hopefully pops an erectile dysfunction–correcting pill at the urging of his anxious wife, Claire (Sonja Marquis), with farcical PG results. They discuss his problem the next day with Gordon’s swaggering brother, Max (Sean Paraventi), and encouraging sister-in-law, Sarah (Wendy Katz Hiller), while packing for a weekend visit with Gordon and Max’s parents; like budding Freuds, the group traces Gordon’s lament to his perpetually negative father. Max recounts the day he clocked Dad in the face and his own berating ceased, and by the transitive property of comic setups, Gordon seizes on the punch as the one thing that will course correct everything miserable in his life. Soon, everyone in the family is clued in to his intention (as sucker-punching infirm old Dad is out of the question, as is violence during the Sabbath). Radiating cartoon villainy to cement his antagonism, the cantankerous septuagenarian Arthur (Clement Valentine) refuses to take the hit lying down, and so the punch becomes a fight, with the bout set for Sunday morning.

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