Review: A MUSICAL CHRISTMAS CAROL & WHO'S HOLIDAY Revive Holiday Traditions at Pittsburgh CLO

Wintertime is a time of tradition, and Pittsburgh understands that as well as any other town. The big tree is up at the skating rink, lights line the major thoroughfares, the Market Square karaoke busker has switched from Whitney Houston to "Last Christmas." Yes, holiday time is a time of ritual, when something old is valued as much as something new. Clearly, this sentiment is understood by Pittsburgh CLO, as they bring us the thirty-second annual production of A Musical Christmas Carol, and the second annual production of Who's Holiday. These shows may be returning favorites, but there's nothing hoary and predictable about either one. Both shows are as fresh as the day they premiered. They work uncommonly well as a double feature, too: despite its family-friendly source material, Christmas Carol gets extremely dark, while the gleefully depraved Who's Holiday ends in a joyful outpouring of healing and redemption.

Right away at the Byham, audiences can tell this isn't the classic, cuddly Victoriana of so many Dickens adaptations. The set design by D. Martin Bookwalter is a macabre gothic treasure trove of broken antiques, piled garbage and haunted-house details. David H. Bell's adaptation, with complex and evocative musical arrangements by Rob Bowman and McCrae Hardy, leans hard into that dark, haunted-house atmosphere. This production, as directed by Scott Evans from David H. Bell's original direction and choreography, is no Hallmark Christmas special. It turns up both the written intensity of Dickens's holiday haunting, and heaps on an extra load of Dickensian melodrama and social commentary, building the world around Scrooge in its grubby meanness to emphasize the flickers of human decency around him. This darker, more melodramatic takes also makes the moments of comic relief, which are many, shine brighter amidst the gloom.

Right away, from his first lines, Charles Shaughnessy is a very different Scrooge than most. It's a subtle change from the commonplace, but Shaughnessy plays Scrooge with a working-class accent, eschewing the scenery-chewing archness and poshness so often associated with the role. This choice immediately establishes not only Scrooge's origin, but his current status: Shaughnessy's Scrooge is making no attempt to hide who he is or where he came from. He may have risen from poverty, but he's only made it to the middle of the middle class, yet he still kicks downward at his peers and lessers with a savage ferocity. Bell's adaptation makes Scrooge not only the head of an investment firm, but an active loan shark who we see shake down tardy clients. Combine that with Scrooge's working-class speech and coarser mannerisms, and it's hard to shake the more modern association that Scrooge appears to be a low-level gangster, a minor figure in the London mob. Most Scrooges shake their canes at bystanders to express scorn and disapproval; when Shaughnessy does it, it's clear that Scrooge would whack them and think nothing of it. All this toughening of the character, gives Scrooge even farther to come; instead of a man who has failed to pursue goodness, we instead are witness to the redemption of a man who has been actively and consistently evil. A villain, not an antihero, is saved in this production.

Shaughnessy's rough-hewn, realistic portrayal often stands out among the more caricatured and mannered supporting roles, who play into the music-hall side of the genre with aplomb. The supporting cast, most of whom play multiple roles, leaven the mournful, wrathful qualities of the story with comic relief and grotesque touches galore. Theo Allyn, a CLO mainstay, comes close to stealing Act 1 with her portrayal of Scrooge's housekeeper. The only way to describe it is "Carol Burnett as Mrs. Lovett." Daniel Krell is scary as Marley's Ghost, but even scarier as the living Marley, who Bell has written and Krell performed as a predatory, Palpatine-esque "dark father" to Scrooge. Saige Smith's Christmas Past is joyfully ethereal yet gentle, an energy she shares with Kat Harkins, who plays "all the women in Scrooge's life." (Harkins has wonderful chemistry- comic, romantic and dramatic- with Alexander Podolinski, a strong presence as Young Scrooge. Their scenes together make me wish their characters extended into Act 2 as well.) Naturally, it wouldn't be Christmas Carol without Tim Hartman as Fezziwig and Christmas Present. A master of vaudevillian asides and music-hall ribaldry, Hartman inches as close to the fourth wall as he can get without breaking it, bringing wild humor to the former role and a fire-and-brimstone preacher's smoldering intensity of purpose to the latter. Krell and Hartman also double in the "future" segment as catty, effete businessmen gossipping together with a third played by J. Alex Noble. Is it dangerously close to being an outdated gay joke? Maybe... and yet it feels so of a piece with the world and with the characters, and so recognizably a type known even today, that no one but the tightest prude or the wokest scold could object.

Around the corner at the Greer, a very different Christmas party is underway. Lara Hayhurst, directed by her longtime collaborator/husband Trey Compton, holds court at Who's Holiday, playing the grown, messy, self-destructive, hypersexual and deeply traumatized Cindy Lou Who. The energy is joyfully unhinged, trashy and Christmas yassified; it's maybe one or two wig changes from counting as an honorary drag show. Hayhurst's ability to bounce between playing Cindy Lou, and playing Hayhurst-as-Cindy-Lou-as-emcee, absolutely gives the show its engine. Watch in awe as she improvises banter with the audience, then snaps back into the intentionally-forced Seussian rhyme structure. This is very much NOT a show for children, though it's full of things your average fourth grade has JOKED about happening behind the scenes of the Grinch story. But as seedy and slutty and gory as it can get, it's still a Christmas special. There is a journey to go on, and Hayhurst never once lets go of the narrative thread. Cindy Lou's life has chewed her up and spit her out again, but it's Christmas, and on Christmas people can grow and heal and find new beginnings. You'll be tempted to shed a tear, then you'll suddenly remember a shameless visual gag or double entendre from half an hour ago, and think "how is this just one show?"

I can't think of a better double feature for a discerning, holiday-loving theatergoer, than the CLO one-two punch offered this year. A beloved TV star on one side, a star-making comedic role on the other. Roast goose, then Jello shots- that's Christmas to me, baby!

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