Turn it up. Christmas carols don’t get any better than this one. Merry Christmas from all of us here in Flyer-land!
Tag: Christmas
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Joyeux Noël
Here are three basic kinds of Christmas shows. First, there are the grownup specials, which are usually comedies like A Tuna Christmas or The Santaland Diaries. These shows lean heavily toward the naughty side of Santa’s checklist. Second, there’s the sophisticated children’s show intended to be “fun for the whole family.” These shows, which are often acted by adults, may or may not be Christmas-themed. The topnotch A Year with Frog and Toad at Circuit Playhouse has but one Christmas-related scene and is an excellent example of this second kind of holiday extravaganza.
The third type of Christmas show is, of course, the classic children’s pageant, which features a large cast of kids whose moms, dads, grams, uncles, cousins, school chums, and crushes fork over the full price of admission in order to see little Suzy say her piece.
This third category is well represented by Germantown Community Theatre’s generally competent and occasionally surprising production of Madeline’s Christmas, a rambling one-act musical kinda-sorta based on Ludwig Bemelmans’ beloved children’s books. The theater’s happy little skit is exactly the type of production guaranteed to make family members bust their buttons with pride while having something of the opposite effect on unrelated ticketholders.
It’s hard to understand why anybody would choose to adapt Madeline’s Christmas for the stage … well, except for the time-proven bankability of the title character, of course. The convoluted story wasn’t originally published as a freestanding book but as an insert in McCall’s magazine, and the story of Madeline’s Christmas Eve encounter with an exotic wizard is generally regarded as an odd and certainly minor addition to Bemelmans’ series. Unlike most holiday tales, it has nothing to do with Santa, reindeer, or the birth of the Christian messiah. And unlike all the other Madeline stories, it doesn’t even rhyme. Stranger still, for a tale set in a convent school, Madeline’s Christmas is chock full of good old-fashioned pagan magic.
The story — if you can call it a story — begins with a wintertime visit to the zoo, where Sister Clavel and all of her young charges catch a nasty cold that prevents them from traveling home for Christmas. Only the precocious, adventurous Madeline is immune to the bug. On Christmas Eve, a creepy old man named Harsha uses his magic powers to heal the sick children and sells them magic carpets for flying home. And although it doesn’t end there exactly, that’s about all there is to Madeline’s Christmas.
Chandler Keen is appropriately spunky as the little redheaded girl in the round yellow hat, and her prematurely husky voice is well suited to the (unfortunately prerecorded) music.
Bo List and Kerry Strahm’s set design reflects the color and line of Bemelmans’ illustrations, but it also looks as though it might have been produced on a budget of just under $7. There’s nothing wrong with a simple, well-conceived performance space, but this particular set pushes the boundaries of acceptable.
Madeline’s Christmas isn’t without merit. The show’s centerpiece finds Madeline and her 11 schoolmates flying over Paris on magic carpets. This bit of stage magic is accomplished using a backlight and simple but effective puppets.
Veteran actress Irene Crist has a reputation for playing strong, sassy, and brassy women. She’s not particularly well known as a director, and Madeline’s Christmas is unlikely to change that. Nevertheless, it’s good to see an artist of Crist’s caliber taking a chance working way out east.
In 1939, the original Madeline series began with the line “In an old house in Paris all covered in vines, lived 12 little girls in two straight lines.” Almost 70 years later, Crist pays homage to that first line and revels in the chaotic symmetry of Bemelmans’ wonderfully yellow illustrations. But with a script this weak, there’s only so much you can do.
Through December 23rd at Germantown Community Theatre
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Christmas Spirit
Jeff Guinn is a man who created a world around Santa Claus. Where most of us see a mythical gift-giving saint (or, for the more cynical, a way-overdone marketing scheme), Guinn saw an amazing story as well as a career path.
First, there was Guinn’s book The Autobiography of Santa Claus, which traces the reality of Saint Nicholas (born 280 AD) and the development of the legend surrounding him. Next up was How Mrs. Claus Saved Christmas, which fictionalizes actual events of 17th-century England, when peasants marched to save Christmas from the Puritans, who had deemed it sinfully pagan. In that tome, Guinn turns a great literary trick, combining the origins of the candy cane and Oliver Cromwell in the same book.
And finally there was The Great Santa Search, in which Saint Nick descends from the North Pole to defend Christmas from the tide of commercialism.
Guinn, a native of Fort Worth, Texas, and author of several non-Christmas books, says that since food was always part of Christmas, his books always included some fabulous feasts — and readers wanted the recipes. This led Guinn on another research trip.
“It became obvious that to really understand Christmas history all over the world, you should look at the traditional foods people use to celebrate,” he says. The result is Santa’s North Pole Cookbook (Tacher), which Guinn will be touring to publicize this month. He’ll be at Davis-Kidd on Tuesday, December 11th.
Guinn confesses he had no idea what he was getting into with a cookbook.
“I started out wondering if I could find two dozen Christmas recipes from around the world,” he says. “I wound up with just under 400 of them. We had some huge tasting parties over the last two years.”
He settled on 75 recipes, and he’s brought the formula from his “Christmas Chronicles” into the kitchen: do the research then lay out stories and facts to expand your knowledge of Christmas. He says 85 percent of the recipes are taken straight from traditions of specific countries, while a chef friend, who appears as Santa’s private chef Lars, has created some “North Pole specialties.”
“I don’t claim to be in any sense a gourmet chef,” Guinn says, “but I am one of those people who enjoys getting into kitchen and trying to make things. We have a good mix of recipes to challenge world-class chefs and also to be fun for families to prepare together. I wanted to make sure everything in the book could be done at home.”
Among the five breakfasts, six breads, nine appetizers, 16 entrées, nine sides, six drinks, and over a dozen desserts, you’ll find little historical notes like where the word “Christmas” comes from and how turkeys get their name.
Some recipes didn’t make it. “Some things, after four or five tries, we finally decided that’s just the way it tastes,” Guinn admits.
Much of what made it won’t strike you as traditional Christmas fare, unless you’ve done Christmas in, say, Italy.
“In Italy, a lot of people were poor and seafood was readily available, so a lot of Christmas dishes feature some kind of seafood,” Guinn says. He’s given us a recipe for capitone fritto, or fried eel.
Can’t find eel in town? There’s also doro wat, an Ehtiopian chicken stew with cardamom, nutmeg, and ginger root. And there’s the Greek christopsomo (Christ’s bread), a raisin-walnut concoction that kids decorate. From Egypt, there are sweet cookies also enjoyed by Muslims.
There is — gasp! — a fruitcake recipe, as well as the story of fruitcake.
“Fruitcake was originally a road food for armies that would could keep forever,” Guinn explains. “Egyptian pharaohs loved it so much that for a while it was illegal for common people to eat it.”
His book has a recipe for “Black Christmas Fruitcake” from Trinidad and Tobago, whose complicated preparation is part of the festivities.
You’ll also find out that there are no plums in plum pudding; rather, the name comes from putting all the ingredients in a bag and boiling them until they expanded to “plum fill” the bag. Guinn’s recipe has 14 ingredients.
And you’ll learn that “palascinta,” or lemony Hungarian pancakes, were thought to be flown in by Jesus and a band of angels.
“I want to expand your Christmas knowledge while expanding your waistline,” Guinn jokes. “The most wonderful thing for me is realizing Christmas really is global. The means by which Saint Nick delivers his presents change, but everybody at some point sits down to the table and has a big feast.”
Jeff Guinn and “Lars” talk cooking, sign copies of Santa’s North Pole Cookbook, and offer baked goods at Davis-Kidd Booksellers on Tuesday, December 11th, at 5:30 p.m.
Categories
The Zoo Lights Up
The Memphis Zoo is sure to dazzle when SunTrust Zoo Lights kicks off Friday, November 23rd.
Boasting more than a million lights — including $100,000 worth of new light features and activities — visitors can tour the display on Friday and Saturday evenings through December 8th and nightly from December 14th to 23rd and December 26th to the 30th.
Among the new features are a Victorian village and a Christmas Around the World display, along with a riverboat, swans, carolers, butterflies, a menorah, a castle, and a fishing Santa. The right jolly old elf will be on hand for photographs with his two live reindeer, Dasher and Dancer. Other activities include a ride on the zoo’s train, the North Pole Express, which is free with admission to the zoo. Horse-drawn carriage tours and the new motion simulator ride “Glacier Run” will be available for $3 per person.
For more information, visit the zoo’s website.
www.memphiszoo.org
On the heels of the boffo success of The Passion of the Christ comes The Nativity Story, a Son of God tale for those who prefer the Christmas Jesus. (Passion of the Christ was for those who prefer the Ultimate Fighting Championship Jesus.) Passion was artistic but a bitter pill to swallow; Nativity is the prequel, a little less artistic but much more palatable.
Nativity‘s greatest strength is how earthy it is. The story gets cozy with turn-of-the-common-era pastoral life, and it has a very organic sensibility, both in a dirt-under-the-fingernails and “this is likely how it actually happened” sense of the word: Though the subject matter is momentous, director Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen) underscores the inherent simplicity of the story, bringing the backwoods-y characters and locales to the forefront. Here, Mary is no self-aware Mother of God-to-be. She’s a young teen who’s horsing around with kids the day before she’s told she will bear the Messiah.
As portrayed in the film, Mary’s great virtue is that she accepts her role without complaint and with trust in God that it will all work out. Her arranged marriage to Joseph is similar to her arranged pregnancy by God, but Mary chafes more at the former. And when the scandal of her pre-marriage pregnancy gets tongues wagging, Mary is aloof to the dangers of stoning that she faces.
Nativity is based as much on Nativity productions staged by runny-nosed kids worldwide as it is on the biblical account: Mary riding a donkey; the star above Bethlehem; the deus ex manger; the gold, frankincense, and myrrh of the Magi; the shepherds looking on. Hardwicke presents some of these iconic images as if they were painted stills. Her shot of the star shining down on the manger could have come straight from Thomas Kinkaide’s portfolio.
Where the stations of the cross was the fundamental framework of The Passion of the Christ, The Nativity Story seems to draw on the stations of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s Rings is said to be a Christ-story equivalent, but I’ve never been able to decode the references. Interestingly, Nativity makes the analogies obvious. Nazareth is Hobbiton; Herod is Sauron; Herod’s men are Ring Wraiths; Mary and Joseph traveling to Bethlehem are Frodo and Sam on the way to Mount Doom; Jesus is the one true ring (and the ring’s climactic destruction finally makes religious sense). I’m compelled to guess that this was on Hardwicke’s mind when making the film, so sharply are the parallels drawn, right down to, in some scenes, very obvious Lord of the Rings film visual echoes and production-value aesthetics.
As Mary, Keisha Castle-Hughes proves her Oscar-nominated turn in Whale Rider was no fluke. Oscar Isaac steals the show as Joseph, as does Ciarán Hinds as sourpuss King Herod. Shohreh Aghdashloo holds the line as Elizabeth, John the Baptist’s too-old-to-conceive mama.
The Nativity Story doesn’t have any apparent evangelistic tendencies. It’s happy to preach to the choir. It leaves it up to pre-existing audience beliefs to create emotional resonance. Coupled with its unwillingness to truly be scary or chilling, The Nativity Story is a bit slight. While The Passion of the Christ was criticized as too bloody, the PG-rated The Nativity Story isn’t bloody enough.
The Nativity Story
Opening Friday, December 1st
Multiple Locations