Successful Christmas entertainments make us forget they are about Christmas.
From Dickens’ Christmas Carol, with its ghosts and redemption story to Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, with its tale of George Bailey’s discovery that his wasted existence is too valuable to throw away, right up to Home Alone’s reassurance that our children can escape being victims, audiences return to these sensing that their Christmas settings are secondary — icing that gives color and depth to whatever the real point is even amid quaint Victorian prose or glorious Hollywood black and white.
This is what the Houston Alley’s “The Night Shift Before Christmas” aims for but only partially achieves. With its raucous humor and adult language, it overpowers the very Christmas ideals its plot relies on. It forgets that Christmas can’t be too real without stepping on its mythological sources and leaving a boot print on Santa’s cookies. Relying more on Scrooge’s visit from three spirits than a babe in the manger, its source material finally isn’t rich enough to transform “Bah humbug” into “Ho, ho, ho!”
Nevertheless, what this production does well is its realistic snapshot of Christmas in the USA: a young woman having to work a one-person shift at a local fast-food eatery–Happy Burger—where the smile is definitely upside down. Her drive-thru customers are snippy, a homeless man Is camped outside the door, and snow has started to fall in Houston (surely it was 80 degrees on the previous day). And then there are the dead people in her life who start to show up.
No wonder Margot is frazzled, sarcastic, and lost. As played by Briana J. Resa, Margot copes by swinging her moods from a thunderbolt cracking the clouds to a puddle starting to dry up. Moreover, Resa not only plays Margot, but she also plays all her ghostly visitors—a task that allows her to show a range of talents from accents to singing and dancing.
Director KJ Sanchez aids this movement from personality to personality by having Resa rely on simple costume adjustments: a pair of boots dug from a trash can, a hat from an ice machine, glamour earrings from a register drawer. These and more Resa handles deftly, but for all her talent, the demand that she switch rapidly from character to character, holding schizophrenic conversations with her various personae becomes a tired trick all too quickly.
It doesn’t help that Isaac Gómez’s script proves predictable. The long-dangled identify of Margot’s final ghostly visitor is hardly a surprise to any but the sleepiest audience members, and it brings with it a degree of unearned sentimentality that many may find hard to swallow. Gómez juggles moments of belly-laughing humor and ethnic characterization well, but his leaps for emotional high points feel lathed in syrup.
Anyone familiar with the Alley’s pre-covid productions of David Sedaris’ “Santaland Diaries” as their adult Christmas show will regret its absence from the repertoire. Compared to that, “The Night Shift Before Christmas” is only an adequate snack.
“The Night Shift Before Christmas” is at the Alley’s Newhaus Theatre through Dec. 29.
Robert Donahoo is a professor at Sam Houston State University and writes theater reviews for The Courier.
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