SEASON'S STAGINGS: HOLIDAY INN

Growing up, the movie Holiday Inn was a perennial favorite in our household, especially around Christmas.  It’s a combination of all my favorite things: musicals, the 1940s, inns, New England, and, most importantly, holidays!  So when I heard there was a new stage musical adaptation headed for Broadway, I promptly bought tickets.  Some unabashed Golden Age musical optimism seemed the perfect anodyne to these last few days of the most stressful election season ever (something the lead actor touched upon during his closing remarks).  It’s got that All-American, Greatest Generation “we’re gonna put on a show!” (which is literally dialogue in the musical) sunniness.

Although the critical reviews were somewhat tepid, I was not disappointed.  The first act was definitely a bit sluggish despite the many chipper Irving Berlin tunes (in addition to the holiday-themed tunes that appear in the original film, the stage version is padded out with several other Berlin songs such as “Blue Skies”).   There was a lot of plot set-up before we actually got to the holidays themselves, but once the first seasonal number started (replete with showgirls dressed like turkeys wearing cornucopia headpieces) I was all in.  The best number came towards the end of Act One—and I’m not saying that just because it was Christmas-themed.

Interestingly, the song was “Shaking the Blue Away,” a Berlin tune I associate more with Easter since it appears in the film Easter Parade.   However here it was repurposed and staged at Christmastime, with a bevy of enthusiastic showboys and showgirls shaking and singing while simultaneously decorating the inn for Christmas.  Most impressive was a tap routine that was done while the dancers also jumped rope using a bedazzled garland.  That’s the kind of old school musical razzle dazzle that I live for! 

The second act was loaded with holiday-themed numbers, including the aforementioned “Easter Parade” (with wonderfully over-the-top Easter bonnets) as well as numbers devoted to Valentine’s Day and the 4^th of July, including a recreation of Fred Astaire’s famous fireworks and tap routine.  Gone is the “Abraham” number from the original film, which makes sense given that it was done in blackface (a reminder that the 1940s, however idealized now, was also fucked up).  The ensemble of the stage version was relatively diverse, and one of the male leads was African-American, which signaled a nice change from the all-white casts of days gone by.  There was one sour note, a tired trans-panic joke where one of the showgirls speaks in a deep man's voice and scares off one of the male leads.  I was surprised that such a moment (aside from being unfunny) would be included in such a traditionally queer-friendly space as Broadway theatre.

Also gone was the problematic character of the African-American housekeeper, replaced with a coded lesbian “handywoman” played to perfection by Megan Lawrence.  It’s the type of supporting character that Thelma Ritter or Mary Wickes would have relished back in the day.  The other standout for me was leading lady Megan Sikora, who in addition to all of the dancing and singing was extremely funny in the type of part that can sometimes be a bit bland.  Speaking of a bit bland, the one weak spot was High School Musical graduate Corbin Bleu.  His dancing was admirable (he’s the one that does the 4^th of July fireworks routine), but his character, a lovable cad played by Fred Astaire in the film, fell flat.  Perhaps due to a surfeit of dialogue, his character barely registered outside of his dancing. 

The true stars of the night, however, was the cranky elderly woman and her hard-of-hearing husband sitting behind us!  She irritably repeated the punchline of every joke to him after the fact, and after a not-terribly-funny joke about a character being stung by a Connecticut wasp, she relayed the punchline and then said:

Cranky Wife: “Took you long enough.”

Husband: “What?”

Cranky Wife: “I said, took you long enough!”

Husband: Pause.  Yes, it did.

I’m waiting for the day those two get their own Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?-style stage musical extravaganza!

FILM FOCUS: MOM'S GOT A DATE WITH A VAMPIRE

This past summer the Disney Channel ran a marathon of all of their made-for-TV movies.  Of course I recorded and stockpiled all of the holiday-themed ones, and now that it’s October I’m finally able to start watching them.  I love a good Disney Channel original movie (or rather a so-bad-it’s-good movie), but I actually haven’t seen as many of these as I’d presumed.  Rather I just feel like I’ve seen them all, probably due to absorbing countless commercials for them over the years while watching other shows.  So while I was familiar with Mom’s Got a Date with a Vampire, this was my first time actually watching it.

The big draw here for me aside from the Halloween theme was Caroline Rhea, who I loved in her role as Aunt Hilda in Sabrina the Teenage Witch.  And I just find her generally likeable, and enjoy that she can never hide her Canadian accent no matter the role she may be playing.  The rest of the cast is impressive as well: Mr. Sheffield (Charles Shaughnessy) from The Nanny plays the titular vampire, while the dad (Robert Carradine) from Lizzie McGuire plays a vampire hunter.

I’ll try to keep the plot recap to a minimum: Caroline Rhea is a harried single mom with three kids.  The two older kids answer a personal ad on their mom’s behalf, figuring if she’s out on a date they’ll be free to sneak themselves.  Of course, just by reading the title of the thing you know Mom’s date turns out to be a vampire and so the kids and a semi-helpful vampire hunter must rescue her, all in the course of one night.

At a trim hour and a half (with commercials) this still lagged a bit, as the kids chased Mom and her vampire date around town, from a restaurant to a rockabilly dance club (more on that soon!), a harvest festival and then finally a lakeside mansion.  Of course the ending is a happy one, with Mom using the power of maternal love to break out her trance just in time to save her kids and seal the vampire back in his coffin.  The real fun here is in the Halloween details, which aren’t as omnipresent as I’d hoped.  But there are still lots of little Halloweeny things to appreciate, so let’s delve in.

By far the best scene of the entire movie was when Mom and the kids first met Mr. Vampire (aka Wolfsbane aka Dimitri) in a supermarket.  Sounds tame, I know, but this is THE GREATEST SUPERMARKET EVER.  Inside and out it is decorated to the max, mostly with these beloved Halloween die-cuts that my family also had when I was a kid.  You know the ones I’m talking about:

I had such fun identifying these decorations throughout the supermarket scene, and besides die-cuts galore the place boasted hay bales, jack-o-lanterns and a display of “Frankenstein cereal” (because Franken Berry is trademarked): 

When I was a kid going to the supermarket around Halloween and Christmas was such a treat, seeing all of the decorations and special displays.  I feel like stores don’t go as all out as they once did, and I miss those life-size cardboard cut-outs of Elvira hawking root beer or faux red-brick cardboard fireplaces at Christmastime.  This scene really made the movie for me, especially since outside of the supermarket scene the Halloween decorations were basically null.  There was nary a pumpkin on a porch for the rest of the movie, making me wonder if they decided to throw in the Halloween theme at the last minute, for just this one scene.

Which isn’t to say there wasn’t plenty of spooky stuff, because there was.  One of the kids is obsessed with a band called the Headless Horsemen, and wears a nifty Headless Horseman tee-shirt throughout (at one point it’s revealed his closet is nothing but this same tee-shirt in different shades).

Mom and Mr. Vampire have dinner at Renfield’s, a nice shout-out to the character of the same name in the original Dracula novel.  The Harvest Festival scene, however, despite its promising name, fell far short of the one portrayed on Parks & Recreation.  Aside from reusing some of the same hay bales and jack-o-lanterns seen in the supermarket, it was just a bunch of non-descript carnival rides and mud.  I noticed that the ground was basically one giant puddle, and some quick internet research revealed the movie was filmed in Canada and they mostly couldn’t show the actors’ feet due to the mud and water.

There’s one last thing worth discussing about Mom’s Got a Date with a Vampire, and that’s the aforementioned rockabilly dance club scene.  For the unfamiliar, rockabilly is sort of a countryish 50s rock subgenre.  First off, a rockabilly dance club is a really random thing to have in a Disney Channel movie aimed at preteens.  The scene featured a real-life rockabilly band called The Royal Crowns, and they play several songs.  Part of Mom’s backstory is that she was once a singer in a band, so she ends up stage to sing.  I’ve never known Caroline Rhea to sing in any of her roles, so I was surprised—until she started singing in a totally different woman’s voice.  I mean, they didn’t even try to find someone who sounds remotely like Caroline Rhea.  It’s definitely up there as one of the worst dubbed scenes I’ve seen (and since I watch a lot of made-for-TV and B-movies, I’ve seen some doozies over the years).  But it’s exactly cheesy scenes like these that make this type of movie so much fun.

So while this could have been a lot heavier on the Halloween theme, there’s a lot of fun to be had, especially if, like me, you’re a fan of 90s sitcom stars, supermarket decorations and rockabilly.

Rock on, Mom!