Broadway Blog - Christine Pedi's Jolly Holly Christmas Folly: Accept No Imitations

The daffy and delightful Christine Pedi's newest cabaret concoction, the Jolly Holly Christmas Folly is an inviting cocktail mixing old favorites with a few new routines; very merry, raucously funny and abundantly cheery.

As expected, there are plenty of diva impersonations featuring Broadway and Hollywood legends getting into the holiday spirit.  Ethel Merman belts out "Silent Night" with reckless abandon and Bette Davis' haughty "O Holy Night," slyly suggests unholy intentions when she commands, "Fall on you knees."  Liza Minnelli's "Rudolf, the Red Nosed Reindeer" ("You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer...  I know so many Prancers.") is a melodramatic lesson about tolerance and Judi Dench singing "The Dreidel Song" is just as hilarious as it sounds.

Her grand finale," The Twelve Divas of Christmas," has audience members picking names out of a hat to determine who sings of partridges in pear trees and who hits the money notes on "five golden rings."  The night I attended the lineup consisted of Bernadette Peters, Joan Rivers, Charo, Gwen Verdon (my first time hearing this one and it is extraordinary), Barbra Streisand, Carol Channing, Katherine Hepburn, a gorgeously purring Eartha Kitt, Angela Lansbury (another new one for me, and it had audience members gasping at her accuracy), Julie Andrews, Jean Stapleton as Edith Bunker and her ever-hysterically Elaine Stritch.  There are more than a dozen names in the hat so every performance brings a new mixture of divas, and each selection is given a personal arrangement by her ace music director/pianist Matthew Ward.

But while I'll never tire of Pedi's pin-point mimicry, it's the moments as herself that make this Forbidden Broadway alum one of the most entertaining cabaret performers in town.  With tender simplicity she earnestly brings blizzard-melting warmth to Irving Berlin's "Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep" and Martin and Blane's "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas," but can handily switch into jazzy broad mode to swing out "The Man With The Bag" (Dudley Brooks, Hal Stanley & Irv Taylor).  A familiar routine has "Santa Claus is Coming To Town" (J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie) done in the sultry style of Kander and Ebb's "Roxie" from Chicago, complete with a revised monologue that cleverly quotes the original ("I started being nice.  Then I started being naughty.  Which is like nice, but without underwear.") but it's in the Oscar Hammerstein/Otto Harbach/George Gershwin comic classic, "Vodka" that she proves herself a superior musical theatre clown, growling out deep inebriated tones as a frisky Russian socialite.

Though the 25^th has already come and gone, Christine Pedi's Jolly Holly Christmas Folly will be keeping yuletides bright through December 30^th, 7pm nightly at the Laurie Beechman Theatre.