Review: PREDICTABLE HOLIDAY ROM-COM/THE UNAUTHORIZED HALLMARK(ISH) PARODY MUSICAL at Second City/The Royal

Given the same source material, why do some parodies succeed, while others fall flat?

Within a week, Toronto audiences had the opportunity to see two musicals which parody that scourge of November to January television, the Hallmark Christmas Movie. The first, PREDICTABLE HOLIDAY ROM-COM, had a brief run at Second City; the second, HALLMARK(ISH)--THE UNAUTHORIZED PARODY MUSICAL, plays into January at The Royal Cinema. 

Both come from impressive pedigrees: the first is from parodymeister George Reinblatt of Evil Dead the Musical (book, lyrics, music, direction) and After the Rain’s Suzy Wilde (music), the second from a New York crew, direction, book and lyrics from Tim Drucker (the parody Love Actually?), book and lyrics from Tony-winner Bonnie Milligan (Kimberly Akimbo), and music and lyrics from Joel Waggoner of the Broadway casts of Be More Chill and School of Rock. 

Both feature leads named Holly and Mark, who encounter each other in Holly’s small hometown, where she’s come back to visit from the big city. Both critique Hallmark’s Dream in a (Ring) Box ethos, where career and love rarely coexist, and our heroine must make a regressive choice to ensure a specific type of societally-approved happiness; both counter with a message that you actually can have it all. Both Hollies have a Christmas Eve deadline, and both Marks have a dead wife and a young daughter. Both plots involve climactic Christmas cookie competitions, and both lead characters count a disguised Santa as a close relative. Both feature a range of pastiche songs, wonderfully garish Christmas sweaters, and bright, sprightly casts.

So why did the former leave me genuinely jolly, and the latter, while not quite a lump of coal, feel like a glass of eggnog left out a bit too long? Yes, ROM-COM benefitted from the fact that I saw it first, but that doesn’t explain it completely.

The comparison of the dueling Hallmark musicals makes the recipe for a perfect parody, like that of the perfect Christmas cookie, abundantly clear. It comes down to cohesiveness of vision, trust in the audience, and an understanding of the source material’s popularity. 

And, perhaps, even a dash of warmth for that source while still exposing each one of its flaws.

A great Christmas cookie can be made with ingredients from peppermint to ginger to cranberries, but usually not all three; settling on a dominant flavour is ideal, and simpler is often better. Similarly, a parody can take aim at multiple aspects of its source material, but a cohesive tone and purpose help unify it into an engaging work. Commenting loudly on how the source material isn’t cohesive is not a get-out-of-jail-free card from providing a cohesive experience yourself.

Milligan and Waggoner’s HALLMARK(ISH) has a loftier, more admirable goal than Reinblatt’s work in how it calls out the sexism of this genre of film throughout the show, devoting a few songs to the topic of the artificial choice between love or career and making the constraints strangling its lead more obvious. 

This Holly (a chipper Alexandra Clementi), an up-and-coming businesswoman in Big City, comes home to help her single mother (Emily Richardson) work her 12 small-town jobs without going into cardiac arrest. Holly chafes against her sexist pig of a boss and knows that her high school crush Mark Hall (Sean Meldrum, deliciously dopey) is a barely literate man who’s clearly beneath her. She uplifts (dumps work on?) her assistant-cum-best friend Martha (Luke WItt, playing a variety of roles at fever pitch), whom she leaves to settle the important, time-sensitive deal that’s partly in Mandarin, and works to eventually subvert the script she’s been given. 

But the higher meta-ambition of the script sometimes works against it, getting lost in the Christmas chaos that takes aim at everything from a deadbeat Santa to gluten sensitivity to cheesy holiday commercials and therefore misses several opportunities. The script’s subplots don’t add narrative tension. The climactic cookie contest is a rivalry between secondary characters with no specific consequences, Holly’s assistant handling the deal gives our lead little agency or time pressure, and referenced characters like Holly’s absentee dad and Mark’s six-year-old daughter are set up without more than momentary payoff at best. 

Holly’s mother’s baking rival, Cookie (Heidi Michelle Thomas, delivering her Disney villain-style song with relish), could have been a terrific narrative foil for Holly in showing the effects of giving up on your big-city dreams, but the parallel is never explicitly drawn in favour of broader jokes about gay people liking poppers. Even letting the (unseen) town moose run amok during the baking championship is an example of inserting wacky hijinks over narrative design, where a simple change would have clearly tied the animal’s actions to the big reveal instead of running alongside it.

While ROM-COM‘s goal is a more straightforward parody of the beats of a Hallmark film, it gets them pretty pitch-perfect. This Holly (Tess Barao, as bright and chirpy as an Avenue Q muppet) is a magazine writer with a terrible boyfriend (an appropriately smarmy A Braatz) and an uncle back in Christmasville whose Christmas tree farm needs saving (Jonathan Shaboo provides most of the musical’s sly winks and self-awareness). 

Here, Holly must make clear choices on a timeline: does she pick Sam, whose idea of romance is chicken fingers and skipping Christmas for meetings, or the Christmas-loving Mark (Tenaj Williams), who’s a little bland and credulous, but a good father to his seven-year-old daughter? Should she cheat, or do the right thing? The cookie contest’s prize will save the farm: does she betray the father and daughter she’s come to adore in only a few hours to find out their late wife and mother’s unbeatable secret ingredient? The rivalry here belongs to the lead, coming in the form of high school nemesis Amber (a superbly snotty Barbara Johnston), who’s looking to take the cookie crown and Holly’s new man, and isn’t beyond scheming with the one she left behind. 

Each movie beat gets an examination and skewering, such as the delightful and prop-laden “Family-Friendly, Multi-Activity, Outdoor Wintertime Date” or the explanatory “I’m Sexy ‘Cause I’ve Got a Kid.” Sure, things may be a bit predictable, but that’s the point–and everything that’s set up is resolved. 

A good Christmas cookie trusts in its own recipe, not coating sugar with more sugar or burying a solid base underneath artificial flavouring. A good parody trusts that its audience understands it for what it is, which is often demonstrated in how much a show explains its own jokes. ROM-COM exhibits a great deal of trust, making references and employing theatrical techniques without (for the most part) pointing to its own cleverness. It presents the joke on its own merits, while HALLMARK(ISH) mugs to the audience more than a vessel of hot chocolate, trying to land every joke twice. This isn’t a dismissal of the value of metatheatre, which ROM-COM uses in fun ways, commenting on the structure of the movie via the structure of its songs—but that’s the joke itself, not an add-on.

As an example, ROM-COM shows its leads getting kiss-blocked in increasingly improbable and therefore amusing ways, focusing the joke on the aborted action and the lengths these films go to delay a first kiss while ramping up the leads’ sexual frustration. HALLMARK(ISH) also has an interrupted romantic moment, but instead of focusing on the characters’ reaction or dissecting why the form splits them apart, the couple watch a brief song from the Christmas tree that fell down between them. The joke is no longer structural or relevant to the relationship that precipitated it; it’s about a random tree we will never encounter again.

In a transition, ROM-COM brings out two sexy gingerbread men backup dancers, who do a routine a la Flashdance; it’s a cute, high-energy visual moment, presented without commentary. You get the reference or you don’t. In a similar situation from HALLMARK(ISH), Cookie yells, “where are my backup dancers?” before their entrance. ROM-COM’s characters simply start singing, while HALLMARK(ISH) prefaces more than one song with, “Now let’s sing about it!” It’s a small difference, but doing this throughout the show consistently deflates the joke by delaying or overextending it, prioritizing the commentary over the actual material. 

And that’s too bad, because HALLMARK(ISH) has plenty of jokes and some very clever wordplay, actually sneaking in a reference to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat’s list of coat colours in a song about types of Christmas cookies, and offering an effectively fast-paced patter song about the moose that gets loose.

Finally, the best cookies are warm out of the oven, and the best media parodies are also warm; they contain an element of affection for the form, considering why the source material, with all its flaws, satisfies many people anyway. Sneering is easy; sympathy is hard. Laughing with the parodied source instead of just at it makes jabs seem earned instead of unkind, placing the parodist and audience in conversation with the original rather than above it from the start (the latter making the parody more vulnerable to criticism of its own mistakes).

ROM-COM knows why so many people enjoy Hallmark movies: most of us want to be loved and accepted, told that we’re enough and that we’re special the way we are. That’s the heart of the genre; it just happens to be delivered in a cliche, regressive package. Reinblatt’s production offers warmth in its character portrayals; Barao’s Holly may leave her articles to the last minute, but she’s actually doing her job, and she seems full of joy and sweetness in how she treats others. The inclusion of Mark’s daughter Heather (Nikki Brianne Samonte has a lovely voice and plays a reasonably credible child), a wisecracking youngster who wants the best for her dad, gives the show a true heart and anchors it. There’s still plenty of acid here; everyone’s deeply flawed and mockable, but ROM-COM plays up the comedic chemistry so you still hope things work out, even for the love-to-hate-them schemers.

The characters of HALLMARK(ISH) operate instead under a sense of being trapped in their material. That’s a concept worth exploring, but one that immediately sets the tone a little meaner, leaving the audience potentially feeling trapped alongside the characters. We want to root for strong, feminist Holly, but her lack of impact on her own story leaves things feeling unmoored. To emphasize the unpleasantness of many of the characters, HALLMARK(ISH) downplays any potential chemistry between actors, thriving in awkward moments and ultimately giving the impression that the team wonders why anyone would ever watch one of these films.

This tonal aspect is reflected in each show’s ethos toward audience participation. ROM-COM’s audience interaction is kind and inclusive, bringing an audience member on stage to play a brief supporting character and giving her the tools to score a round of applause with minimal effort. HALLMARK(ISH) prefers to insult its audience, setting viewers up to collectively fail with sudden, impossible tasks.

Anyone who’s watched Bake Off knows that baking is a fine art; given the exact same recipe, one baker may present a perfect Yule Log, and the next a Yule Wonder What Happened Log. Both of these shows are made of fine ingredients, but that’s the way the Hallmark parody cookie crumbles. ROM-COM could reach a little higher in examining the social issues at play in our love of Hallmark movies, but it’s a damn good parody with some staying power to its silliness. HALLMARK(ISH) has a lot of promise, but could go back for a second spin in the oven.

Photos of the cast of Predictable Holiday Rom-Com by Sam Moffatt