Haul out the holly…

Here in New York, stages uptown and down fill with yuletide performances. And while the Radio City Christmas Spectacular and Madison Square Garden's A Christmas Carol–The Musical may get most of the attention, every year the city's significantly less endowed theaters offer up their own brand of holiday cheer. I took in three holiday shows off-off-Broadway, all of which are running right up until Santa starts loading his sleigh for the most important business trip of the year.

From what I've seen, the best performance this holiday season not only doesn't come from an actor, it comes from a show without any actors: Charles Phoenix's God Bless Americana: The Retro Holiday Slide Show. This production at the Pyramid Club in the East Village delivers exactly what the title promises: a screening of 100-plus slides taken in festive homes around the country during the '50s and '60s. Phoenix, a kitsch-culture historian, has taken two dreaded experiences—looking at other people's photos, and sitting around making nice with relatives during the holidays—and miraculously turned them into a riotous good time. What makes watching these old Kodachromes (in an underheated room furnished with folding chairs, no less) so much fun? Is it the tacky parade floats, the clash of wood paneling and candy-colored sofas, the stupefied expressions on the celebrators' faces? Or the embarrassing resemblance to your family's old pictures? All of the above.

And more. Because equally entertaining is Phoenix's delicious narration, which blends the cattiness of Queer Eye's Carson with the wry eloquence of an NPR raconteur. As Phoenix clicks through his carousel of images, he tells us as much as he truthfully knows about the subjects while critiquing their decor, fashions, food, choice of gifts and apparent emotions. He drops in a few history factoids too, such as: the 1954 Rose Parade was the first program ever televised in color, but only 22 homes had color TVs then.

There's also the inherent hilarity of these slides: intended as a serious memento of a treasured time, they're full of monstrously unphotogenic images. Like a Santa who stuffed a pillow around his thighs instead of his belly; a male guest in hot pants at a suburban family party; a baby's demonic-looking Santa doll; and mom and dad near the tree, she dressed up in an elegant blouse and satiny skirt, he wearing a sleeveless undershirt (all the better to show off his upper-arm tattoo).

The Retro Holiday Slide Show focuses on Christmastime, but Halloween, Easter and the Fourth of July are also represented, along with a couple of behind-the-scenes views of Thanksgiving that you probably haven't seen before but will never forget. Phoenix has been plumbing his collection of 200,000 vintage slides—amassed through flea-market and estate-sale purchases and viewer donations—for public performances since 1998. This is the second year he's done a holiday program, but this New York premiere is a different edition from the one presented in 2002 in L.A. His Retro Vacation Slide Show of the USA won "Most Unique Theatrical Experience" at this summer's New York Fringe Festival. But unique is only half the equation; his holiday show will have you laughing all the way.

For more conventional holiday fare—sort of—there's A Bush Carol or George Dubya and the Xmas of Evil, produced by Blue Coyote Theatre Group. Conventional in that it's modeled on Dickens' oft-adapted Christmas tale; unconventional in that the cast of characters, instead of the usual assortment of ghosts and Cratchits, includes the likes of Ashcroft and Cheney.

It's also fairly conventional in its lambasting of George W. Bush and his administration. While it's always edifying to hear reiterated what a pack of craven, warmongering, Enron-abetting, Constitution-averse hypocrites they are, there's room for more trenchant satire than, say, the scene in which Bush puppeteer—er, GOP strategist—Karl Rove and Dick Cheney dream up the policies they'll have to enact to compensate campaign donors.

The first two jokes in A Bush Carol—its punny title and having Karla Faye Tucker, one of the Texas prisoners executed by Bush, as his guide through past, present and future—are clever, but the script could be more barbed. Bush doesn't even get a comeuppance in this version. Instead of punishing him, writer David Johnston chooses to remonstrate his charmed life and irredeemability (which preclude any Scrooge-like transformation). Those are worthwhile points, but I was looking forward to a scene where Bush is outfitted with the "chains" he forged in life, since Tucker, in explaining to him that he is doomed to bear the weight of his weapons, had taunted him about how heavy those missiles fired on Iraq are. If she showed Dubya a future with, perhaps, Hillary Clinton as president (because voters had become so repulsed by conservatives), the play would have offered caustic commentary as well as fealty to the original's idea of an evildoer being frightened into changing his ways.

I guess the show's existence, though, is enough of a reason to be jolly for its target audience. And the cast of 10 all bring vigor and humor to their performances. A Bush Carol even surprises with four musical numbers (penned by Stephen Speights), including a toe-tapping pas de deux between Cheney and Rove that's a great sight gag.

For a kinder, gentler Christmas play, the Vital Theatre Company has revived The Gifts of the Magi, which was produced at Lambs Theatre in seasons past. The musical was created by composer Randy Courts and his frequent collaborator Mark St. Germain, who as a dramatist has written Camping With Henry and Tom, which ran off Broadway a few years back, and Ears on a Beatle, a John Lennon-inspired work that's on its way to New York after a summer run in the Berkshires.

Gifts interweaves the stories "The Gift of the Magi" and "The Cop and the Anthem" with a newsboy narrator and characters named City Him and City Her to evoke the turn-of-the-century New York idealized (and idolized) by O. Henry. Although a perfectly pleasant affair, The Gifts of the Magi should be more enchanted given the nostalgia and holiday spirit on which it's founded. However, the set is too sparse to really capture any ambience. The designer might have thought it necessary to keep it simple because of the changing locales, but the backdrop and walls could have been dressed up with more festive, historic accoutrements that would have been appropriate for all scenes. The costumes and props have just such period detail.

Gifts of the Magi aspires merely to honor the true meaning of Christmas, embodied by the impoverished lovers who sacrifice their most cherished possessions in order to afford gifts. Thus it's not a particularly peppy show, and in a score of mostly ballads, the highlight is the uptempo "Bum Luck." Yet the benign, affectionate nature of the show can provide a respite from holiday hustle and bustle.

For performance and ticket information, go to www.godblessamericana.com for The Retro Holiday Slide Show, www.bluecoyote.org for A Bush Carol, www.vitaltheatre.org for The Gifts of the Magi.