The Santaland Diaries: Mean, Mean, Mean -- But in a Good Way

The Santaland Diaries: Mean, Mean, Mean -- But in a Good Way

Zachary Scott Theatre Center,

through January 2

Running Time: 1 hr, 30 min

David Sedaris won the withered black hearts of grinches the land over with his 1997 book Holidays on Ice and related NPR readings. Sedaris' short story The Santaland Diaries is a relentless account of his season of forced perkiness as a green tights-clad elf at Macy's famous Santaland, the artificial-snow-coated department store village of Miracle on 34th Street fame. Sedaris, who gave a reading this past October at the Paramount Theatre, is known for milking everyday experiences for all the irony they're worth (though Sedaris' everyday experiences are not Everyman's). Joe Mantello's adaptation of Sedaris' writings for the stage and director Dave Steakley's compilation of monologue and song take Sedaris' spirit of satire to the masses, with a show at times tender, occasionally kind, but usually mean, mean, mean -- inductive of a catharsis much appreciated as we wade into the depths of the millennial holiday season.

The show opens with the divine Meredith Robertson chasing the faint of heart away with her feather-boaed rendition of the giggly "Santa Baby" and the raunchy "Making Love Alone." (Christmas may be for the kids, but this show ain't.) On her heels, Martin Burke -- he of the boundless energy -- does the Sedaris monologue about the Christmas his sister rocked the family's suburban world with a mysterious expedition to the wrong side of the tracks. Then, after Robertson delivers another couple of sultry-funny Santa songs ("Surabaya Santa" has a bitter Mrs. Kringle belting out lyrics like: "I will escape your Santa claws"), the show's title piece is upon us, and Burke acts out Sedaris' misadventures at Macy's from start to finish.

In Sedaris' world (via Mantello and Steakley), everything potentially warm and fuzzy is torn out of the rosy glow of TV-movie fantasyland and brought for examination into a light less gentle. For Sedaris, the frost on Santa's beard is really spit. "Chicken" is not served around a loving family table; rather, a man has legs "the color and pebbled texture of a store-bought" one. "Angels" are not the cherubim hovering over the baby Jesus, but rather the name a wreck of a woman assigns, slurringly, to the eager children gathered around her feet to hear about the streetwalking life. Little kids pee in banks of artificial snow; Macy's Candy Cane Forest is strewn with dirty diapers. As in one scene, Santaland metamorphoses into Satanland via a few red lights and a cackle from hyperactive, charisma-laden star Martin Burke, so The Santaland Diaries in toto rips off the smiling mask of traditional Christmas shows to reveal, à la Scooby Doo, the bleak, cynical, depressed guts of the holiday, and hilariously.

Robertson (whose part was played by Meta Rosen in the November shows) devilishly accompanies Burke throughout his Santaland odyssey. When he gets into his elf outfit, she is the costume designer who sings "Deck the Halls," putting particular emphasis on "Don we now our gay apparel." When he talks about a noseless child who comes to see Santa, she does a quick rendition of "Jack Frost nipping at your nose." Burke and Robertson, who have worked together before, have a steady comedic chemistry, and both at times cozy up to the audience as though doing stand-up. All the while, musical director Jason Connor sits somberly at the piano -- so much the straight man to Burke and Robertson's antics that he comes across as the very pink of holiday depression.

So, Rockettes Schmockettes. Santaland Diaries is an adroitly vicious, emotionally satisfying holiday show like no other currently on offer. It deserves a place side by side with all the other holiday fare, and the world will be a better place once it's made into a TV special and shown every year directly after It's a Wonderful Life -- especially because Sedaris and company are not, when push comes to shove, unavailable to moments of true goodness and revelation. While the show does ring a death knell for certain visions of a sugar-plum-sweet holiday, it offers in trade a world-wise replacement that is so funny and so much more psychologically helpful in facing the season that losing that white Christmas fantasy turns out to be the greatest gift of all.