Christmas in Connecticut, at Christmas, in Connecticut. Almost sounds too pat, doesn’t it? Well, there are some things that are rote, but more that are right in Goodspeed Musicals’ likable adaptation of the 1945 Warner Bros. seasonal perennial, featuring more than a dozen pleasant new songs by composer Jason Howland of Little Women – The Musical and lyricist Amanda Yesnowitz of Somewhere in Time.
Imagine Martha Stewart as a comfortable country squire, complete with husband and baby, asked by her boss to host an orphaned, decorated war hero for the holidays. Now imagine that Martha is secretly a total fraud: can’t cook or do crafts, has ripped off all her recipes, is unmarried and childless, and has only borrowed the farm from a co-worker so as to acquiesce to her mercurial, powerful publisher’s whim.
On screen, Barbara Stanwyck is outstanding (when was she ever not?) as the savvy Manhattanite who has her charade under control until a whole mess of farcical doings expose it. Naturally, she wins the heart of the war hero in the bargain.
Recognizing the relative thinness of plot for a full-length musical, librettists Patrick Pacheco and Erik Forrest Jackson spend a good deal of time – just about the entirety of act one, in fact – to build up an origin story for “Liz Lane,” the pseudonymous, ersatz happy homemaker who boasts fans both on the home front and in the foxholes. (Both film and musical take place in 1944, when WWII was winding down in the Allies’ favor but on a most uncertain timetable.)
In this telling, a young aspiring crusading journalist arrives in the Big Apple to take a job that utterly compromises her ideals. In so doing, she discovers that material success is less important than personal integrity, and if that synopsis smacks of The Devil Wears Prada, well, there are only so many stories in the world.
While the backstory is familiar and its end foreordained, that doesn’t mean it can’t play out as authentic. I bought the character arc, especially since this premiere production is lucky enough to assign Audrey Cardwell the unenviable task of following in Stanwyck’s footsteps. Cardwell can act and sing up a storm with undeniable presence to boot. (A resemblance to the young Hillary Rodham contributes to the character’s forthrightness.) She manages to pull off the not-easy feat of not realizing she’s been selling out her convictions, until the eleventh hour when she believably executes the turnabout.
Pacheco and Jackson have made conquering hero Jefferson (Josh Breckenridge, very appealing) the initiator of the action rather than Liz’s inevitable heartthrob. He gets his own romance with magazine fact checker Gladys (Rashidra Scott, equally appealing). Instead, co-worker Dudley (Raymond J. Lee), the farm’s owner, is given a union organizer brother (Matt Bogart), who grumpily impersonates “Mr. Lane,” though his Socialist leanings clash with Liz’s arriviste ambitions until they don’t, and love blooms.
Those particular changes might work better if director Amy Anders Corcoran hadn’t led Bogart into one-note angry contempt, totally out of keeping with the otherwise light tone. Also, it’s sad to see the show embrace the weary cliché of Dudley as a nervous nellie, who periodically pulls out a paper bag to breathe into. (I kept wishing they’d made him a snide sophisticate out of his element, sort of like George Sanders or Rod in Avenue Q, a dimension the show currently lacks.) The bag bit is a dud and the character tedious, rare missteps in Corcoran’s generally canny staging, especially of the escalating farcical confusions.
The rest of the cast meets their calling with adequate aplomb, none more so than James Judy as the real Top Chef (beloved S. Z. Sakall in the movie). Seemingly quietly amused at how hard his castmates are working, Judy suavely walks off with the show on one arm, and his opposite number Tina Stafford as Dudley’s harried domestic help on the other.
There’s little choreography to speak of (Marjorie Failoni is credited), and the score is workmanlike at best: I was glad Howland and Yesnowitz steered clear of power ballads, but dismayed that they made no effort to insert any big-band or swing into the period setting. And though there’s a sweetness to their closing plea for peace, “May You Inherit,” the absence of a genuine Christmas number seems downright forgetful.
All things considered, prospects for Main Stem success for something this mild, with its less-than-immediately-recognizable title, would seem to be slim to nil. But regionals, colleges, and little theaters should definitely give this one a look, as an appealing alternative to yet one more Christmas Carol to increase audiences and revenue at year’s end.
Christmas in Connecticut opened December 7, 2022, at the Goodspeed Opera House (East Haddam, CT) and runs through December 30. Tickets and information: www.goodspeed.org
