Alabama Theatre’s Christmas Show Spreading Cheer Through Holiday Season
By Christina Knauss
If you’re looking for a mega-dose of holiday spirit, the Christmas show at the Alabama Theatre is the place for you.
Anybody who leaves the Barefoot Landing theatre without feeling at least a little bit of the spirit after this show is either a distant relative of Scrooge or should honestly check themselves for a pulse.
For more than two and a half hours, every aspect of Christmas comes at you from the highly talented performers who make up the cast of “One: The Show” during the regular season.
If you’re looking for traditional carols and tributes to snowstorms and warm firesides, they’ve got that. Holiday tunes done to boogie-woogie and rock rhythms? Got that. Country tunes? Got it. Santa Claus? Check. Sacred songs? Check. Big dancing Christmas cookies?
Yes, they’ve got big dancing Christmas cookies too.
This show is completely, totally and unabashedly about all things Christmas, and featured comedian Grant Turner (a.k.a “Ricky Mokel”) lets the crowd know it from the start.
“I’ve got to warn you that this show contains graphic scenes of Christmas,” Ricky tells the audience before the music starts. He says that people who don’t like the holiday or who have a problem with the imagery and lyrics “might be suffering from political correctness ... a disease that has left millions of people without a clue!”
Mokel appears several other times during intervals in the show, doing his signature blend of down-home country comedy and topical humor, including references to life along the Grand Strand and even gentle references to the health care plan currently making its way through Congress.
The show features a dazzling array of set, lighting and costume changes. The cast starts off performing numbers against a beautifully-lit, Dickens-style village backdrop, which then becomes a Santa’s workshop and, during the second act, the interior of an old-fashioned home decorated for the holidays.
Among the holiday standards performed by the cast: “Happy Holidays,” “Silver Bells,” a boogie-woogie version of “Jingle Bells” complete with jitterbug dancing, and “I’ve Got My Love to Keep me Warm.”
One of the most popular numbers in the regular “One” show is “Fever,” in which a man is pulled from the audience and serenaded by attractive women in the cast. For the Christmas show, this has been changed to the sweetly flirty “Santa Baby,” and the lucky guys get the same treatment to the delight of the audience.
http://www.mbsun.com/assets_c/2009/12/Alabama box-thumb-350x262-2565.jpgDance is one of the Alabama cast’s strongest suits, and male cast members don’t disappoint with a deft, fun tap-dance number. While dressed as toy soldiers, they use their feet to tap out the tune “Up On the Housetop” on a huge keyboard laid out on the floor.
The dancing Christmas cookies are a delight for kids in the audience, as is an appearance by a gleefully goofy Rudolph during “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Santa, of course, also shows up for the fun, dropping to the stage from the rafters in a lighted sleigh. Holiday glitz gets taken to the max with a second-act number that features the stage lights blinking on and off in intricate patterns to a tune by Trans-Siberian Orchestra.
Those looking for the true meaning of Christmas won’t be disappointed, as the story of Christ’s birth is told in many songs during the second half, including “Go Tell it On the Mountain” and a moving rendition of “Mary Did You Know” by new cast member Denise Tichener-Collins.
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