Christmas, Again

Holiday Inn at Studio 54

(L-R: Corbin Bleu, Lora Lee Gayner, and Bryce Pinkham in a promo for Holiday Inn.)

            Let us now – with whatever swallowed gags and underhanded irony that may be necessary – praise Connecticut.  It is a radiantly inoffensive place in almost every sense.  It is small but not too small to be relevant, north of New York City but not too far north to be hick country.  If it had a color, it would be beige.  It’s rural enough to be believable as the location for a rambling, disused parsnip farm, in the new Broadway musical, Holiday Inn (more on why that name sounds familiar later), but sophisticated enough to be believable as the location for the tryout theater that originated this sweet, fun, and largely insignificant musical.

            That’s Goodspeed Opera House, incidentally, in East Haddam, CT.  It’s been a hotbed of Broadway transfers since Man of La Mancha originated there, in 1965, but in the last eight years its only production to move to the Main Stem has been 2015’s Amazing Grace, which by all accounts fell slightly short of its title.  So, children, who do we turn to when new and nuance have both been done to death?  Irving Berlin, naturally, and the 1942 score to the film Holiday Inn, which he basically wrote for a paycheck and thought he could leave behind him, until what he thought was a minor song, “White Christmas,” started selling and wouldn’t stop.

            Bryce Pinkham sings “White Christmas” in this production, and goddamn if he’s not every inch the star he proved himself to be in 2014’s A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder when he’s singing it – a completely unusual Broadway leading man with the diction and remove of Noel Coward emanating from a man who looks like Bela Lugosi.  The problem with “White Christmas,” however, is that it is, as previously intimated, the best-selling song of all time, and the minute you start playing it the oh-so-self-satisfied sighs of recognition from the audience are going to start drowning out the song.  Pinkham gets a huge laugh when he refers to it as “just a little Christmas song I started working on and put in a drawer,” and I’m not entirely sure it was intended.  But there’s the rub – any musical based on one of the most familiar musicals of the era, one starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, for that matter, has got to be willing to laugh at itself a little. 

If Holiday Inn has a fault, it’s that it won’t do that.  There is nothing original or new about the show whatsoever – aside from the fact that Corbin Bleu, in the Astaire part, is buffer and more of a buffoon than his predecessor’s character ever was.  It is an unapologetically superficial, upbeat, old-fashioned musical; I’m not complaining here, just telling you what the damn thing’s already wearing on its sleeve.  It is, as is its home state and setting, radiantly inoffensive.

But – and watch yourself, this is a big but – that is literally all that’s wrong with it.  Gordon Greenberg’s production is pitch-perfect in every conceivable way, particularly its effervescent choreography, by Denis Jones, which accomplishes things I’ve never seen tap-dancing do before, and the all-around excellent performances.  Bleu, bless his heart, really is an excellent and a natural dancer (take those High School Musical basketballs out of his hands and it turns out the guy can actually move like a human being).  Lora Lee Gayer, as the love interest who comes between Pinkham and Bleu, has a genuinely unique voice and delivery that far outstrips the passable book (by Greenberg and Chad Hodge). 

I could complain about a million things – you never really believe that Pinkham and Bleu, supposedly best friends, could ever stand each other the least bit – but who comes to Holiday Inn to get down and dirty?  You come to be diverted (a perfect word for this show), and smile and clap and very occasionally gasp at a series of interchangeable chorus lines and Berlin numbers.  After all, as Berlin writes in my personal pick for best song of the score, “Happy Holiday,” “If you’re burdened down with trouble / If your nerves are wearing thin / Pack your load down the road / And come to Holiday Inn.”  If you can find one exposed nerve in this Holiday Inn, alert the management, and they’ll be around to sand it down straight away.