Rockin’ Christmas Party: Party Out of Bounds
Paramount Theatre,
through December 30
Running Time: 2 hrs, 20 min
Ever seen an office Christmas party go out of control? When all those tightly wound co-workers filled with the, ahem, spirit of the season abruptly lose their workplace inhibitions and start raucously belting out Yuletide carols (and any other songs that strike their fancy), accessorizing their outfits with tinsel, poinsettias, and shiny colored balls, and vigorously shaking their groove thangs. Well, to get a feel for the current edition of Rockin’ Christmas Party, you need only picture that … only magnified about a thousand times and with much better dancing.
This seasonal sensation, inspired by the Zachary Scott Theatre Center’s success with the pop music revue Beehive, just gets bigger and looser and funkier every time it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. While the revue retains the basic structure from earlier years — each of the six cast members still gets to live out a show-biz fantasy that allows for lots of high-voltage singing and dancing — director Dave Steakley isn’t letting any moss grow on this tannenbaum. He’s continued to tweak the song list, pruning away some of the older hits (including most of those holiday numbers included in the first few years) to seed in more thumpin’-thumpin’ bumpalicious dance hits from the Disco Era and later, and encouraging production designer Michael Raiford to cultivate his luxuriantly twisted dreams of spectacle. In the latest update, that means, for instance, Christmas trees as sleek as warheads: polished cones of metal studded with dozens of green lights. It also means a completely reconceived fantasy involving an American Bandstand-like TV program, which Steakley and Raiford have transformed into a trippy, hippie romp. The segment now opens with the fabulous Felicia Dinwiddie, in a white page-boy wig and a lemon-yellow vinyl dress, emerging from a giant white clamshell onto a stage framed by Jolly Green Giant-scale daisies. From there, it boogie-oogies into a string of Seventies and Eighties hits, such as “Love Shack,” “Brick House,” and “Superfreak,” with performers prancing around in outfits that include a wire top hat resembling an upside-down planter, a solid gold Mylar suit, and a whole lot more yellow vinyl. It’s spectacular, and surreal, and as close to an acid flashback as you’re likely to get in Christmas-themed entertainment.
But even as the show finds new ways to astound and delight its many fans, it provides many elements that are familiar and that have contributed to the Party‘s ongoing popularity. Chief among these are the dynamic performances by a cast that continues to grow in skill and polish. This year’s lead performers are all old hands at the show — besides Dinwiddie, the cast includes Jacqui Cross, Andra Mitrovich, Roderick Sanford, Rebecca Schoolar, and Kenny Williams — and they launch into their respective numbers with a comfortable surety; it’s like taking a tour of the neighborhood with the old gang. The excitement they provided in Christmas Partys past — Williams’ silky-smooth reading of “The Christmas Song,” Schoolar’s teasing “Merry, Merry Christmas Baby,” Sanford’s explosive “I Feel Good,” Mitrovich’s powerhouse “I’m a Woman,” Cross’ goosebump-inducing “Bridge over Troubled Water,” and more — is all there, much of it even enhanced by the cast members’ development as artists. Mitrovich, one of Rockin‘s original show-stoppers, has refined her delivery, pushing less yet producing more. Dinwiddie continues to come into her own, developing more and more power; it’s readily apparent in her “Tutti Frutti,” which is like grabbing a downed power line, feeding you an eye-opening jolt of electricity. And Williams shows what life on the road can do for a young performer; the past year that he’s spent in touring musicals has transformed him into an artist of precision and panache whose presence is commanding and whose vocals are creamier than ever.
With visuals that dazzle, vocals to make you swoon, moves by the hyperkinetic Larissa Wolcott and Melissa Santos that mesmerize, wigs by Willa Kaye Warren that appear to defy the laws of physics, and accompaniment by a righteous band — led by A-list musical director Allen Robertson — that hot-wires the audience for rhythm, the Rockin’ Christmas Party of 1999 provides just the kind of giddy, goofy buzz that the old office Christmas party does … only magnified about a thousand times and with a much better morning after.
This article appears in December 24 • 1999.