"A Christmas Story": You'll Shoot Your Eye Out

by Jack Craib, New Rep Reviewer

When New Rep announced that its holiday show for the current season would be “A Christmas Story”, based on the popular film, and not yet another revisit to “A Christmas Carol”, this reviewer was relieved indeed (despite a practice of reading the original Dickens every Christmas season for more than four decades). Hopes were high that another holiday treat would join the ranks of “It’s a Wonderful Life”, “The Nutcracker Suite”, “Santaland Diaries” and of course Scrooge, under the theatrical tree, garlanded with hefty dollops of originality. Ah, but as the saying goes, be careful what you wish for, or as one of the characters in this play version states, “stay within the margins”.

Adapting any work for the stage from another source is always fraught with peril, especially when it’s a film so dependent on visual gags and voiceover narration. Stephen Sondheim once stated in his memorable lyrics, “the choice may have been mistaken, the choosing was not”, but this may have been the initial and fatal mistaken choice by the playwright Philip Grecian. A theatrical production is always the result of directorial and acting choices, all subjective (as is theater criticism, for that matter). Here Director Diego Arciniegas and his cast of twelve (seven of whom are child actors) have also gone astray. From the exhausting performance of Barlow Adamson as the elder Ralph/Narrator (at times in dire need of some Ritalin) to the over-the-top emoting of Ralphie’s parents, Owen Doyle and Stacy Fischer (still relatively sedate when compared to their filmic counterparts, Darren McGavin and Melinda Dillon), there is surely a lot of energy on stage. The children are especially enthusiastic, despite their incomprehensibly differing ages and heights (and, in one strange choice, transgender), some occasionally miked, some not, another misguided choice.

Many of those visual highlights from the film get short shrift here because they can’t survive the adaptation. One boy’s rescue (to unstick his tongue from an icy pole) is rendered virtually offstage; the movie’s overhead shot of an overdressed younger brother’s immobility in the snow when he falls over is another casualty of the transition to stage; the climactic turkey theft by the neighborhood canine pack is embarrassingly awkward. So is the fantasy scene wherein a teacher is turned on by a student’s essay, one of only two original playwright touches. Happily, the other bit of originality pays off, when Santa encounters an incontinent urchin, and this happens only once. Grecian’s script and its screenplay source both tend to repeat the same schtick several times in case you didn’t catch it the first time, such as Ralphie’s slow-mo moments, his parents’ dueling struggles with a lamp, and his mother’s dinner of red cabbage and meatloaf. (Bah, hamburg).

As most of the audience will probably know from the film, this is a very slight story about a nine-year-old boy’s wish for an air rifle for Christmas. At least three adults in the work (his mother, his teacher, and ultimately Santa Claus himself, or at least a department store’s version of him) warn our young hero “you’ll shoot your eye out”. By the end of this ninety minute play (which seemed considerably longer than that), you might be forgiven for asking Ralphie to shoot you (well, not literally) and put you out of your misery. Would that the people responsible for this creation had stayed within the margins and left the original film (and its source, a Jean Shepherd tale first published in Playboy, no less) alone. Scrooge, where are you when we need you?