White Christmas and A Christmas Carol: Second-Tier Holiday Cheer

Clyde Alves, Jonalyn Saxer, and the company of White Christmas. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski.)

I loved the stage transcription of Irving Berlin’s 1954 Christmas movie musical White Christmas when it came through Boston in 2006 and again in 2015, so I was looking forward to seeing the Goodspeed Opera House version that opened last week, directed by Hunter Foster. But except for Kelli Barclay’s dance numbers it’s a letdown. The major problem is the acting, which is somehow simultaneously flat and overstated. The book by David Ives and Paul Blake, adapted from the screenplay by Norman Krasna, Norman Panama and Melvin Frank has a fairly complicated plot involving the efforts of Bob Wallace and Phil Davis, a pair of Broadway song and dance men, World War II veterans who fought under a beloved general, to round up their unit in order to pay tribute to him at Christmas when they discover he’s running a ramshackle Vermont inn – and to mount a revue there to put the place in the black. Still, it’s light and casual. The jokes aren’t inspired, but on both tours the clowning had the low-key pleasures of a good old-fashioned TV variety special from the decade of the film. And the characters were all satisfyingly human, so you felt drawn in. At the Goodspeed, the humor feels warmed-over and then juiced up so that you’re doubly aware that what you’re not hearing isn’t fresh. The vaudeville touches make you groan, especially a running gag involving a pair of chorus girls who keep trying to chase Phil (Clyde Alves) down at the worst possible moments, when he’s trying to woo Judy Haynes (Jonalyn Saxer), half of a sister act he and Bob discover in a New York club and end up hiring for the show. And the actors aren’t strong enough to make their characters convincing, including Omar Lopez-Cepero as Bob, Lauren Nicole Chapman as Betty, the other Haynes sister, who falls for him until a misguided rumor makes her think he’s a rat, and Bruce Sabath as General Waverly. (In the movie Bob and Betty were played by Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney, Phil and Judy by Danny Kaye and Vera-Ellen, and the general by Dean Jagger.)

The singing is an improvement over the acting, but Chapman, who has a fine voice, pushes her ballads, especially the best of them, “Love, You Didn’t Do Right by Me,” which needs to be undersold, and the fussy gown Jeff Hendry has given her kills off the number. (It’s an odd mistake because his costumes are mostly quite attractive.) When Chapman is matched vocally with Lopez-Cepero he grounds her, so “Love and the Weather” early in act one is very enjoyable; he also rescues “Love, You Didn’t Do Right by Me” when he sails in immediately afterwards with “How Deep Is the Ocean.” There are eighteen songs, a mixture of tunes you’ll recognize from the movie and interpolations, some famous and some, like “Love and the Weather,” obscure. This cobbled-together score is a delight. As the inn’s concierge, Martha, who turns out to have a Broadway past, Aurelia Williams makes faces and delivers every line to the balcony – I had the same problem with her in Goodspeed’s Anne of Green Gables three years ago – but when she joins Chapman and Saxer for a trio, “Falling Out of Love Can Be Fun,” she relaxes into the close harmony and comes off much better. Her scenery chewing and that of Jasmine Ashanti Gillenwaters and Linda Neel as the amorous chorines and Jeff Gallup as another veteran from General Waverly’s unit who’s now Ed Sullivan’s booking agent made me restless. Anyway there’s not much scenery to chew – David L. Arsenault’s sets are not among Goodspeed’s better efforts.

Fortunately, the dancing is splendid, from Alves and Saxer, who are featured in several big numbers, to the five couples in the ensemble. There are two major dance numbers in the first act, “The Best Things Happen When You’re Dancing” and “Blue Skies,” and one in the second act, “I Love a Piano,” which quotes Bobby Connolly’s famous “Too Marvelous for Words” extravaganza in the 1937 movie musical Ready, Willing and Able - the one where Ruby Keeler and Lee Dixon dance on a giant piano. The show sends you into intermission with a knockout number, “Blue Skies,” and then caps it at the top of act two with “Piano.” Earlier, “Snow,” performed by Alves and Saxer on the Vermont-bound train with the chorus, makes a virtue of a constricted space. These highlights make the production worth watching.

Rebecka Jones and the company of A Christmas Carol. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson.)

Michael Wilson’s production of his own adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is a Christmas perennial at Hartford Stage, where Wilson was artistic director for many years, but I had never seen it, so I decided to check it out this year at long last. It’s expertly staged, with Wilson’s whirligig command of the space. The scenic design by Tony Straiges focuses on the back of the stage, which lends the show an expansive storybook look and leaves plenty of room for the actors to spin out and down toward the house. A bridge upstage center grounds the enormous playing area, which Robert Weiezel has lit with a plummy festiveness, and the magical intrusions by the three Christmas ghosts pop out like the surprises in an advent calendar. Christmas Past glides on atop a sleigh; Christmas Present (Stuart Rider) is enthroned on a moving pedestal; and the mute Christmas Future is a skeleton riding a tricycle. The special visual effects are indeed special.

But the production is suffused with a Disneyland quality that works against the emotional depth of the story, though Wilson’s script certainly pays homage to its darker qualities. A quartet of rambunctious ghosts, choreographed by Hope Clarke (whose work has been reproduced by Derric Harris), shows up repeatedly. Wilson has subtitled his version A Ghost Story of Christmas, but these specters overstay their welcome, and the show generally seems to bend under a lot of apparatus that it doesn’t need. That includes, I’m afraid, some rather overemphatic acting – especially by Guiesseppe Jones as Scrooge. He certainly fills the space, but his performance is more obstreperous than shaped to convey the character.

The second act is more enjoyable than the first, and some of the members of the large ensemble break through – Stuart Rider as the Spirit of Christmas Present, whose jolly persona is undergirded with melancholy; Patrick O’Konis (my colleague at College of the Holy Cross) as Bob Cratchit, who is touching without falling into sentimentality in the Christmas Future sequence; and especially Erik Bloomquist in the dual roles of Scrooge’s cheery nephew Fred and Scrooge himself at thirty. Playing the second of these characters Bloomquist gets to show impressive range: when we first see him, courting Belle Fezziwig, his employer’s daughter, at a Christmas party, he holds out hope for a promising future, but when he reappears that hope has been shadowed over by a poisonous obsession with money. This Christmas Carol has much to recommend it but I wish it weren’t so boisterous.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movie.