Christmas Bells and Christmas on the Pecos fail to light up the holiday season
by Martin BradyArticle Tools
Someone somewhere needs to write a new and entertaining Christmas show for live theater. With everyone avoiding A Christmas Carol and other done-to-death holiday-themed vehicles, you might end up getting stuck with something like Christmas Belles, now on the main stage at Chaffin's Barn Dinner Theatre. While it's certainly a mystery how three presumably sentient beings—Jessie Jones, Nicholas Hope and Jamie Wooten—could plow forward in crafting such a witless and tiresome piece of redneck seasonal fluff, more puzzling still is how any theater company could choose to invest the time and sweat required to mount the thing.
Christmas Belles painfully recalls the worst kind of sitcoms—the ones where the writing is so bad that valiant, put-upon actors are forced to pull out every possible trick in the book to wring some humor out of their torpid dialogue. We laugh maybe three times during a two-and-a-half-hour exercise in futility that proves toxic to talented veteran performers with serious track records (Martha Wilkinson, Michael Montgomery), energetic younger players (Jenny Norris-Light), and most of all to the remainder of the ensemble of 11, who either have little presence or skill or are simply hopelessly trapped in roles that are tritely conceived.
The story is about a community Christmas show gone awry in the fictional town of Fayro, Texas. Get ready for big hair, trailer-trash romantic entanglements, NASCAR references, jokes about goiters, vasectomies and hot flashes, a sickly Santa, an Elvis impersonation, and the tedious point-counterpoint of a family of bickering Southern sisters.
A yuletide Steel Magnolias this is not, and after two acts and 27 (!) scenes, the endlessly static and strained script attempts to desperately wrap things up with a holiday sing-along. No thanks.
Nate Eppler directs efficiently enough, and his cast pushes courageously to grab laughs, but the play doesn't give anyone a fighting chance. Billy Ditty's costumes—fun wigs, cool shoes and boots—are fabulous. But what's worse than being all dressed up with nowhere to go? Plus the Barn has ditched its dessert buffet; now you have to order the after-dinner sweets off an à la carte menu. Bah, humbug.
Sight unseen, it's a guarantee that the Barn's back-stage show, A Sanders Family Christmas, is way better than Christmas Belles. It's got a talented musical director at the helm—Tim Fudge—and a potentially good cast that surely can render gospel tunes and Christmas carols with a measure of cheer and warmth. If you're rolling the dice for a holiday outing, give that a shot—and leave Fayro to the locals.
Yet another Texas Christmas
Writer-director Robert A. O'Connell can be credited with trying to craft that original seasonal show we so desperately need. In 2008, he gave us The Road to Bethlehem, which gathered together a motley crew of truth-seekers on their way to pay homage to the newborn Christ Child. That GroundWorks Theatre production was infused with wit, wry language and resonant if lighthearted perspectives on religious culture and the Bible, and proved generally successful.
The same cannot exactly be said for O'Connell's new Christmas on the Pecos, which mines a similar theme: A group of disparate individuals find themselves together on Christmas Eve, ultimately celebrating simple humanity and the magical spirit of the season.
The setting is South Texas in 1995, where two working cowboys (Jim Wright and Lane Wright) have pitched camp to wait out a snowstorm. Eventually, an illegal Mexican couple (Marc Mazzone and Diana Holland) arrive and enlist their aid, especially since the señora is about to deliver a baby. Still later, an eccentric gent in a Santa suit (Weldon Stice) appears and shares the campfire, and lastly, two border patrol officers (Phil Brady and Lily Palmer) enter the scene.
O'Connell aims for warmth and jocularity, his Nativity analogy evoking the former, his pure-at-heart characterizations evoking the latter. The running time pulls in comfortably at under 90 minutes, but even so, the play limps undramatically to its pat conclusion. Act 1 is almost completely composed of the cowboys regaling each other with personal tales about Christmas, and O'Connell saddles them with longwinded speeches that attempt to exploit the setup well beyond what its lightweight structure can handle. The he-said/he-said dialogue grows tedious, and by the time the immigrant couple make their presence known, it's time for intermission.
Act 2 offers more character humor, some seasonal friendliness and a positive outlook on the good-heartedness of law enforcement, but the practically plotless script is gentle to a fault and relies too much on the ensemble to wring laughs and tenderness out of their somewhat fey portrayals.
O'Connell directs his cast—worthy players all—competently, and everyone seems committed to celebrating the holiday spirit. But alas, the playwright's attempt to more or less rework a previous winning formula is devoid of the least bit of tension, and his characters' interplay is neither as colorful nor as playful as last year's effort.
Christmas on the Pecos has plenty of good will toward men, but not much of anything else.
Email arts@nashvillescene.com.
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