The Gayest Christmas Pageant Ever!: Oh Mary.

The press releases for The Gayest Christmas Pageant Ever! contain a quote from Kathy Griffin: "The Title Alone is Brilliant!".  Sadly, this is entirely accurate- the title is the sole brilliant aspect of the play. 

Presented by Alternative Theatre Company, themselves an LGBT theatre from Tucson, Arizona, the play is a bewildering morass of bad community theatre tropes, gay soapboxing, and jokes that were intended to be so offensive they're funny but are usually neither.

It's an inauspicious start in the Big Apple for Alternative Theatre Company; according to the press release, ATC produces award-winning LGBT plays that engage an audience in a conversation relating to specific feelings and messages reflecting the gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans-gender community. Founded in 1991 by Joe Marshall, the company relocated from Arizona to New York in 2009.

The plot is such: At the Triangle Theater in West Hollywood, Rod (Jason B. Schmidt) writes the plays.  His lover Manny (Adam Weinstock), and Don (Blaine Pennington), the other founder of the theatre company, know his plays are terrible, so they've hired someone else to write the Christmas play, the infamous M&M, who brings in The Gayest Christmas Pageant.  Unfortunately M&M is immediately offended by Tarquin, the snappish costume designer (Jonathan Chang), and Jim, the heterosexual stoner tech dude (Ryan Wright), and leaves.  But that doesn't matter because once Manny and Don read Rod's new play, they decide it's great and needs to be done, but to keep Rod from directing it himself, they need to change the name.  They hire Margie (Crystal Cotton), a director from New York who owes Manny a favor, and she meets Janet (Elyse Beyer), who stage manages all the plays.  Rod gets hit by a falling Fresnel, and Jesus (Alvaro Sena) appears for some reason; only Jim can see him, except when other people can see him. Jesus is apparently Gay and Latino.   They hold auditions for the play, where Triangle regular Tina (Heather Shields) auditions, then is upstaged by an actor named Fromage (Bryan Zoppi), who does the same monologue.  Then more people audition, including a guy with a Santa puppet (James Stewart), and Tyrone (Kershel Anthony) a homeboy whose monologue is an ad from Craigslist.  ...the rest of the play continues in that same scattershot vein till finally the show goes on and is terrible, but the bad review sells out the show, and someone hears about Jesus appearing and so there are protestors...

There is no rhyme or reason to the script and much of it is unclear, for instance why the theater's continued to produce Rod's terrible plays when they haven't been making any money on them, why anyone thinks his new script they actually decide to perform is so jaw-droppingly wonderful (it's a Christmas pageant, with the shepherds as Brokeback Mountain cowboys (John Paul Venuti and Chris Von Hoffman) and Herod as a leather daddy (Ben Jones))...  In a last-minute move, they come up with the title The Gayest Christmas Pageant Ever!, in order to avoid copyright infringement on M&M's previous play- but of course one can't copyright titles, though even so they could still be sued under the Unfair Competition Law, a doctrine that prevents a competitor from using a duplicate or similar title and thereby creating a likelihood of confusion regarding the source of that title.

To give it credit, some isolated moments in the play are amusing, such as Alexandra Dickson as the lesbian playing the gruffest Angel of the Annunciation ever, Jim trying to fit in by learning Gay slang from a book, and Tyrone's aforementioned Craigslist audition, but most of the jokes are not well set up and don't derive from real character.  All the characters are stereotypes, so it's difficult to care for or about any of them.  The only love story in this gay play is between two heterosexuals (although, for some reason, Jesus turns her into a boy at the end?  So the straight guy can still sleep with him/her?  Which, what?)  Plot elements are dropped, unnecessary sequences are interpolated (including a preachy scene where, while waiting to get his gun back, Tyrone is subjected to a parade of flashbacks of Growing Up Gay in different parts of the world).

You may have noticed there are a lot of names in this review- the show contains an appalling 24 actors, most of whom could have been doubled to keep the cast down, including poor Kymberlie Joseph who only comes on for one very brief gag flashback as Tyrone's mother.  According to the press release (which I was clinging to, in an attempt to make some sense of all this), there were 37 performers in the original reading.  Perhaps it's unsurprising that so many of them stoop to upstaging and scene-stealing. 

The play attempts to skewer community theatre à la Waiting For Guffman, but if you're going to make fun of bad theatre, it's a good idea to be better than the things you mock. This play is not.

 

The Gayest Christmas Pageant Ever!

By Joe Marshall

AlterNative Theatre Company

http://www.alternativetheatreco.org

 

Sunday, November 29, performs Friday and Saturday at 8PM and Sunday at 5PM at the Actors' Playhouse (100 7th Ave South)

 

Photo Credit: Stuart Levine

1. John Paul Venuti, Chris von Hoffman, Bryan Zoppi, Heather Shields, Alexandra Dickson, Dorian McGhee, James Stewart, Jamey Nicholas, Evan Schultz
2. Ben Jones, Dorian McGhee, James Stewart, Jamey Nicholas