'Every Christmas' packs many holiday tales into one comedy
Can you believe it? 'Tis the season. Again. Another year has rolled around and suddenly everywhere you turn its "Deck the Halls" and "Ho-ho-ho!" and "Buy! Buy! Buy!" And we haven't even had our Thanksgiving turkey yet.
It's enough to turn even the most warm-hearted Who in Whoville into a full-blown, sour-stomached, small-hearted Grinch.
Luckily, the folks at the Noble Fool have the perfect antidote to holiday sensory overload. A comedy making fun of it all: "Every Christmas Story Ever Told."
"The show is done in the style of the Reduced Shakespeare Company," Noble Fool Artistic Director John Gawlik said.
The acclaimed comedy troupe is known for boiling down large texts -- like the Bible or the complete works of Williams Shakespeare -- into 90 minutes of comedy.
"In 'Every Christmas Story Ever Told' there are basically three guys," Gawlik said, "and they tell about 20 different popular holiday stories in one show.
"They do Rudolph and Frosty, the Grinch and 'It's a Wonderful Life' and a 3½-minute 'Nutcracker,' " Gawlik said. "They do a bit referring to that old Norelco ad when Santa comes riding on a Norelco electric razor. They even perform a song that is every Christmas carol ever sung."
Basically, every secular take on the holidays done on TV in the last 40-some years is fair game.
Written by a trio of writers, including Chicagoan James Fitzgerald, the show premiered at the New Jersey-based Cape May theater in 2003 and has since been done every holiday season at theaters coast-to-coast.
" 'Roasting Chestnuts' was our holiday show," Gawlik said, "but we did 'Roasting Chestnuts' for three seasons, and we wanted to do something different. Someone recommended this show to me. We read it and thought it was great -- funny, great for the whole family, with lots of audience interaction."
In a send-up of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," for example, "some gentleman in the audience" is drafted to play little Cindy Lou Who, the little girl who wants to know why the Grinch, dressed as Santa, is stealing her family's Christmas tree.
"On one level it is a clown show with three clowns," Gawlik said. "Whenever one of the guys enters a scene, he comes in to create mayhem, to support the mayhem that's happening, or to subvert what is going on."
In talking about this show, Gawlik, who also directs, can't contain himself. Even after weeks of rehearsal, it still makes him laugh.
"There is one bit," Gawlik chuckles quietly, "where we find out we can't do 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer' because it's copyrighted. So the guys do 'Gustav the Green-Nosed Rein-goat.' "