Appeared in BroadwayWorld.com, December 16, 2003
Around the Theater World
Haul out the holly.
by Adrienne Onofri
As much as the presents, decorations and gluttony, partaking of seasonal entertainment is de rigueur for the complete holiday experience. You’ve got those classic animated specials on TV, Elf and other new Christmas-themed movies at the multiplex and, inevitably, some local chorale performing Handel’s Messiah.
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.
A few of the merrymaking clans featured in The Retro Holiday Slide Show.
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.
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