'A Very Phoenix Xmas' once again knows where our funny bones are

We've long been accustomed to the commercialization of Christmas, which has been denounced from

Kids hail top-hatted Frosty before the day heats up.

pulpits so often that many of us could cobble together a suitable sermon on the topic as rapidly as AI might.

Naturally, there's long been the spread of money to be made with the very imagery of the holiday, its meaning drummed into us by repetition. Through stage and screen and Coca-Cola ads, visions of merchandised sugarplums dance in our heads. 

The latest production of "A Very Phoenix Xmas" packages the overload into "It's a Wonderful Die Hard Life Story Actually." It's seasonal carry-on baggage stuffed into the overhead compartment for the flight home. Expect some turbulence.

Entertainment rituals rub shoulders with the religious kind. "The Christmas Story" in demonic TV repetition is the basis of one of "A Very Phoenix Xmas"s most haunting skits. As a culture, we have an obsession with holiday returns to "The Nutcracker" and "A Christmas Carol." Once Black Friday rolls around, we all climb onto the "Little Drummer Boy" treadmill. Pa rum pum pum pum.

Perceptions of the year-end holidays, chiefly the secular blossoming of Christmas cheer, are wrapped up in draining our time and our pocketbooks. This show is properly a magical blend of stagecraft and multimedia enchantment across a bagful of original sketches. However brief, all the characterizations are full-bore. None of the performances are sketchy. That's the province of the sketches themselves.

At the center of it all is a hyper-versatile cast of five stage comedians: Matthew Altman, Devan Matthias, Paige Neely, Zachariah Stonerock, and Kelsey Van Voorst. They are under the direction of a spectacularly gifted comic mastermind, Claire Wilcher.  In addition to brief screen appearances as an actor, she is the  writer of that "Christmas Story" sketch, as well as a hilarious takedown of the hit song about a bouncy, temperature-challenged Frosty the Snowman, whose top hat allows him to cavort with kids at play outdoors, but only so long as his snowy body stays intact. It's not climate change; it's just the perennial threat snowmen face. They come, they thaw, they are conquered.

  

Their men captivated by "Die Hard," merry wives celebrate freedom. 

There are other kinds of meltdown in the course of the show. In Bennett Ayres' "Prancer Promo," a chirpy TV host finds her tinseled interview style upended by a visit from a movie director, jarringly effervescent about his dark fable on one of Santa's reindeer. 

Steven Korbar's "Die Hard Widows" presents three wives sidelined by their husbands' must-see holiday TV. As is commonly known, the action movie plants its setting of adventure at a Christmas party, which is all the excuse the men need to ritualize revisits to the macho thriller. The women are ill-at-ease about their abandonment, but build some high-energy retribution to their fun and games off in another part of the house. 

One of the cleverest playwrights in the long history of "Very Phoenix Xmas" is Mark Harvey Levine, whose 2024 representation is "A Requiem for Shermy." The sketch places the awkward calendar proximity of Christmas and Hanukkah under the spotlight, reflected in a discontinued "Peanuts" character's sad dialogue with Violet, another one set aside by the strip's creator. (As a prepubescent "Peanuts" fan, I had a crush on Violet, who seemed like one of those intelligent girls I was always trying to impress at school. Then she vanished. In a few years, I was much more focused on Veronica and Betty in the "Archie" comics. I never impressed that type, either.) I like the insightful sympathy Levine brings to his sketches, with the gift for humor never shortchanged.

The interaction of the stage medium with the icons of holiday film are well-integrated, thanks to the design team (Tim Dick, Zac Hunter, Ben Dobler, and Monique Burts). The running set piece, elaborated through several segments, is  Jeff Clawson's "All the Jimmy Stewarts," in which Stonerock, assuming the rhetorical style, hesitant drawl and mashed-potato diction of the top star of "It''s a Wonderful Life," rolls through a series of speeches designed to pacify the anxiety of George Bailey's fellow small-town citizens about the solvency of the financial institution he represents.

The climax, in Clawson's extensive tweaking of the original, is the way Bailey moderates a discussion of what constitutes a genuine Christmas movie. The mimicry becomes infectious, and his audience, as well as the show's, is nudged to privilege the opinions of each and every one of us. The consensus of this expertly concocted production is likely to approach unanimous approval throughout the Phoenix Theatre Cultural Centre run, which ends on December 22.

[Photos: Indy Ghost Light]