What is it about Christmas movies that we can’t seem to get enough of? The inevitable happy endings, no matter how high stakes the conflict; the coziness, symbolized by ubiquitous mugs of hot cocoa and shimmering decor; the flawed characters who transform for the better, are perhaps a start.
“A Very Kalamazoo Christmas” at Farmers Alley Theatre has all of these in spades but in live theatre form that localizes the story with familiar names, places, and references, as well as a couple of surprise celebrity cameos. It’s a live Hallmark movie parody that offers some very silly holiday entertainment.
Written by Michigan playwright Robert Hawlmark (nom de plume for John Lepard, cofounder of Williamston Theatre, where a variation of the play premiered in 2022), the story focuses on Kalamazoo native Felice, a Christmas-hating, career-driven woman, who’s striving to become a Project Director at Banks Enterprises in “The Big City of Battle Creek” to the exclusion of most everything else in her life, most vexingly her fiancé’s proposal and trip to Cancun as well as her schnapps-loving widowed mother’s pleas for her to come home for Christmas.
But when her boss implores her to negotiate the acquisition of a small business in Kalamazoo with the promise of that promotion, she bumps into her almost-boyfriend from high school biology class, George, who also happens to own the small business she’s set to takeover, bonds with his motherless child, hits her head and develops amnesia, which leads to various other shenanigans that unfurl against the backdrop of familiar projected city scene images from our very own hometown.
It’s cheesy as all get-out, deliberately and fantastically so, and Director Kevin Theis heightens its playful self consciousness that deliberately pokes fun at itself with overblown acting and cartoonish technical elements.
Moments of reverie emerge with a pirouette and a harp glissando (sound by Carter Rice), lightening fast costume changes (costume design by Lori Green) happen on stage and sometimes in silhouette, and glasses of wine, mugs of cocoa, bottles of Schnapps, cut out cookies, a cash register, and other props (from Savannah Draper) are big cut-out cartoons.
Just four actors play all the characters with Kait Auburn as an earnest, doe-eyed Felice and Steve Peebles as the equally earnest, single-dad George, the plumber/carpenter/electrician/bovine veterinarian with a firm handshake and enviable head of hair. But it’s Emma Brock, who plays wine-swilling, inexplicably southern, BFF Barb—as well as Felice’s schnapps-guzzling, emotionally manipulative mom (among others)—and Joe Dempsey as scorned fiancé Jack, George’s dad, George’s 3rd grader son, and Felice’s evil genius boss, who make this show such a hoot.
Watching them flip and switch between characters and costumes, embodying them distinctly and with great hilarity, is worth the cost of admission. Dempsey’s beanie-wearing little boy is a heart-melting scream.
It’s these moments of humanity that cut through the utterly goofy, gooey, wine-soaked holiday cheeseball rolled in nuts of this show that move it beyond the stereotypes, the predictable plot, the eye-rolling jokes, into the territory of real joy.
“A Very Kalamazoo Christmas” is a fun, holiday escape—a 90-minute romp, live entertainment masquerading as a familiar Christmas movie set in our very own, little, old Kazoolywood.
A Very Kalamazoo Christmas
Farmers Alley Theatre
Nov. 20-Dec. 14
https://www.farmersalleytheatre.com/shows/a-very-kalamazoo-christmas
