Whoa, Holy Night

As anyone who’s ever spun Al Green in the bedroom knows, there’s not a thing on Earth that soul singing can’t make better. Whether you’re in love or busted up, at church or at the club, soul enriches the good and whoops ass on the bad, balms your aches and butters your bread.

For quite a while now, I’ve thought this was the one pop music truth I knew that J. Kent Barnhart didn’t (other than the fact that no show dedicated to “the American songbook” should include Billy Joel). But suddenly, a full year since I first stuffed this page with raves for his Quality Hill Playhouse cabarets, he has remembered that all God’s children got rhythm — even the extravagantly white, well-north-of-retirement QHP crowd. They’re no stiffs, and now that Barnhart has spiked this year’s Christmas in Song with surprising bursts of soul and gospel, they’re whooping louder than ever. The show’s even better than last year’s, and last year’s was the best Christmas show in town.

As always, Barnhart serves as arranger, pianist and master of ceremonies, doling out wry and informative introductions to two dozen songs both fresh and familiar. He’s joined, generally, by musical-theater pros of poise and strict diction, and there’s almost always an opera-trained ringer with a voice that, harnessed by science, could launch astronauts into orbit.

Whether it’s thickened to a shout or melting into falsetto, Matt Leisy’s golden tenor glides, and Elaine Fox — unlike other opera-level singers I’ve heard at QHP — never tries to make our heads explode. Instead, she shines her light on the songs, showing restraint even on a scrape-your-lungs-out belter like “Oh, Holy Night.” On the simple melody of “Christmas Through a Child’s Eyes,” her voice glimmers like sunshine on water.

These two would be enough, but Quality Hill has dug deeper, introducing LeShea Wright, a radiant young singer adept at both soul and gospel testifying (on a pair of rousing a cappella numbers). She wields a voice both plush and raw, one that mostly soothes but has a thrilling touch of rust. On her pop numbers, especially “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” Wright flaunts an easy, from-the-gut phrasing and makes off with Christmas in Song.

A religious spirit invigorates the show. Punching out chords and damn near tap-dancing at the piano, Barnhart tears into “Pray on Christmas,” an ersatz gospel stomper from Harry Connick Jr. that brings us to intermission on a high. These crowd-pleasers are leavened early by a set of somber hymns, many unfamiliar and most gorgeous. The highlight you’ll recognize: an arrangement of “Oh, Little Town of Bethlehem” so delicate that to breathe might destroy it. Beforehand, Barnhart told us that, upon first reading this carol’s lyrics, Helen Keller said, “I had always known there was a God, but now I’ve seen his face.”

That’s overstatement, or course, and you won’t see the face of God at Christmas in Song. But you’ll get closer than you will in most churches.
There’s also a quick stab at Christmas cheer in the Coterie’s Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, but it’s nothing to find much thanks in. Left of the stage sits a stylized, star-topped Christmas tree composed of odd, circular sections tiered like a wedding cake. It was only after some staring at it that I understood. It’s meant to suggest Tinker Toys.

The whole set is Tinker Toys, for some reason, all rounded wood in primary colors and punctured with sprocket holes. When our narrator, Peter (an appealing Steven Eubank), tells us that his mother “flopped down on the couch,” we see nothing of the sort. Instead, she sets herself gingerly, carefully, down upon a Tinker Toy or a Lincoln Log or something else wholly at odds with Judy Blume’s acutely realistic portrayal of growing up.

The show, a manic and maddening botch of Blume’s classic, is directed by the usually reliable Missy Koonce. Last winter’s Bonanza at Late Night Theatre hit consistent highs, and I find it impossible to hold her responsible for the American Heartland’s Duck Hunter Shoots Angel — in fact, I admire her effort to polish that turd.

Here, Koonce’s sensibility doesn’t fit. As with Late Night’s parodies, her Tales is more a riff on its source than it is an adaptation. It’s more interested in period music and outfits (in this case, the early ’70s, represented in distractingly outlandish threads) than it is in the story’s emotional center. In a parody, that’s fine; at the Coterie, it’s a mess. Surrounded by noisy, garish performances and frequently rushed through his monologues, Eubank’s Peter is stranded. His complaints about his brother — the pained psychological core of the book — hardly register. In Blume, Fudge comes across as the world’s most annoying 2-year-old. Here, he’s outdone by almost everyone around him; by the end, he even has to compete with Alex Espy, done up distractingly in drag.

Good work from Espy and Aurelie Roque salvages some scenes, and Koonce herself is alternately (and realistically) warm and distracted as Peter’s mother. Sometimes, when it’s just her and Eubank, real feeling leaks through, and we recall why this story has lasted 30 years. But soon, again, we’re back to hyperactive silliness, ripped from childhood into mere childishness.