 By Megan Grumbling
Portland Phoenix If you’re looking for a lavish, Broadway-quality production of a holiday classic, look to the Portsmouth Music Hall, where you can have a Scotch in its trippy steampunk bar, ascend into its gorgeous 1876 theater, and then watch over a dozen professional singer-dancers hoof stylishly through an all-the-frills production of White Christmas, the Bing Crosby/Danny Kaye vehicle for yuletide sentiment, post-WWII affirmation and all-around love of show-biz. The Ogunquit Playhouse produces this top-notch production of the classic film, under the direction of Jayme McDaniel. The story is almost unimportant once everyone starts dancing, but it is as follows: Soldier buddies Bob Wallace (Joey Sorge) and Phil Davis (Jeffry Denman) have gone from pick-up holiday shows during the war to dazzling show-biz success as a duo on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and beyond. What do they lack? Well, Phil can’t keep his hands off of chorus girls, and Bob is a stick-in-the-mud when it comes to romance: What they need, of course, is a sister act. They find it in Betty and Judy Haynes (Kate Loprest and Vanessa Sonon), and off they go to a holiday gig in Vermont. However, in an interestingly prescient plot point, Vermont is 60 degrees in December, and the paying guests split for snowier climes. But shows must go on and Christmas saved and so forth, not least because the owner of the inn turns out to be someone dear to Bob and Phil. Production design in this production is, across the board, transporting. The main set of the Vermont inn is impeccably drawn; we see both the interior, with clean rustic lines, cream-colored wood and tasteful garlands, and the exterior, with warm windows amid white clapboards. Even minor settings are striking: a sweet switchboard cubby filled with skis; the dark Art-Deco decadence of Jimmy’s Back Room; a train-car filled with svelte, beautiful people in plaid scarves singing about snow. And White Christmas is a candyland of costume changes – if you ever wondered what colors everyone is wearing in all those black-and-white movies, you’ll get an eyeful of Bob and Phil in green-apple green suits on the Ed Sullivan show, with their chorus of girls in pink-and-polka-dots and guys in pale-teal. There are even ugly-Christmas-sweater outfits! The lead pairings are beautifully cast and executed. As confident womanizer Phil, Sorge is lean, nimble and fast-talking, while the darker, more measured Denman has a voice of slow, barely inflected velvet – especially lovely in his sweet little number “Count Your Blessings.” Betty and Judy, too, counterpoint each other stylishly. As Betty, Loprest, with russet hair, has a classic beauty and reticent elegance, while Sonon makes the blonde Judy sizzle – she’s a sinuous dancer and just snarky enough, with a shrewd smile and sharp little grace notes, like her confident little hop-hop-hop as she goes off to dance with Phil. And to watch the charismatic Phil and Judy dance together – effortlessly sensuous – might make you wish that social dancing had made it into the 21st century. Supporting actors are just as strong, including Deborah Jean Templin as Martha, inn concierge and, formerly, Broadway hoofer and serial lover of horn-players; and the precocious, cute little Susan (Lily Ramras and Caraline Shaheen, alternating). Finally, the ensemble of singer-dancers is stellar, everything you’d want from Broadway, and the show has some dizzying big-ticket dance numbers: “I Love a Piano” (despite having perhaps the most cursory lyrics in the playbook) lets its dancers show off some stupendously intricate and precise tap riffs talking back and forth to each other. The Ogunquit Playhouse’s White Christmas at the Music Hall is the real deal in show-biz talent and extravagance, replete with a final little surprise (which I won’t spoil) that’s at once decadent and utterly winning. It may not be a Christmas miracle, exactly, but it’s quite a Christmas luxury. White Christmas | Music and lyrics by Irving Berlin; book by David Ives and Paul Blake | Directed by Jayme McDaniel | Produced by the Ogunquit Playhouse and presented by the Music Hall, in Portsmouth | Through Dec. 20 | Call 603.436.2400 or visit www.themusichall.org. Comments are closed.
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