HYMN & CAROL
Snack Stix Productions
Christmas shows tend to be too solemn, too sentimental, or both. Then there are Hymn & Carol and Christmas With Elvis, which aim for the ridiculous. Both go too far. The most effective parts of Hymn & Carol are the most solemn–the ridiculous interludes merely interrupt the sublime Christmas songs. And Christmas With Elvis would benefit from a generous dose of sentimentality: here the characters merely exchange quips and gross out the audience.
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Hymn & Carol is mostly a musical revue consisting of 16 songs, ranging from traditional carols like “Little Town of Bethlehem” to the incredibly eccentric “Turkey Lurkey Time,” written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. They’re sung in multipart harmony by the ten cast members, with little or no accompaniment. The songs by themselves would make a pleasant but solemn show, so to lighten things up Paul V. Smith, a Chicago actor and director, has written eight monologues for the cast, each of which adds a modern slant to the biblical account of the birth of Christ. The first monologue is delivered by a woman (Jane McEneaney) attending a rock concert by prophets–including the granddaddy of them all, the prophet Isaiah. “I mean, when Isaiah started out, nobody was doing prophecy,” says the devoted fan. “He started this whole thing, this whole craze.” The second monologue is delivered by a woman (Lynne Magnavite) who was helping Mary shop for a wedding gown when Gabriel appeared in the dressing room, wings and all, to announce that Mary would become the mother of God. “I was filled with jealousy,” the woman says. “Why not me? I mean, I wasn’t a virgin, no, but let’s not get technical. I used to be a virgin.”
Smith modeled Hymn & Carol on the Church of England’s Festival of Lessons and Carols, a seasonal service that blends Bible readings with Christmas songs. Smith’s humorous “lessons” certainly mitigate the songs’ seriousness. Now if he just trims a bit of the humor and allows the solemnity of the songs to come through more, Hymn & Carol might just make a pleasant holiday confection.
But for Christmas With Elvis to work, Trudy must reach a crisis and change. Like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life–the film that appears on Trudy’s TV when she switches it on in the beginning–she must discover something about herself, something that will stop the binging and purging (which she describes in gruesome detail). Sure, such an outcome would make the play as sentimental as a Frank Capra film, but in her own offbeat way, that seems to be precisely what the playwright is aiming at.
