From Film to Fabulous: Arts Club Presents White Christmas

Take a movie and add some more famed Irving Berlin songs, some great tap dancing and perform it live. Put a creatively integrated band, enhanced with well-sampled and performed digital keyboards, playing expertly in a pit in front of the stage, then add voices warm and dramatic and we have gone from film to fabulous. And the audience gets to sing the title song—twice!

It seems like someone took the film and gave it some artistic ginseng. That is primarily because when the Arts Club takes on a musical we get great performing skills, genuine smiles, nothing calculated. Director Bill Millerd has once again given musicals a fresh definition, one based in their origins. He has drawn on great talent and aimed at high industry standards, presenting the best. The audience is welcomed inside a musical when Millerd is at the helm.

Lucky Vancouver. Lucky performances. Lucky audiences. Fun videos start here: http://www.artsclub.com/20092010/videos/white-christmas/actors.html

White Christmas is about a duo of army buddies with post WWII success in show business, who lend a helping hand to their former commanding officer who has a suffering Vermont lodge business. Sisters Judy and Betty Haynes, played with straightforward good nature by Sara-Jeanne Hosie and Monique Lund, are recruited by the two army buddies to help everyone begin to feel the love and joy.

The ramrod commanding office is one tough nut and clearly does not “get” show business. Unlike our provincial government, he warms up like a husband resisting a visit to the opera. Then in perfect musical timing, he begins to understand that Bob and Phil have great respect and admiration for him so they would do anything to help out with the his failing hotel business. He says he has learned to “count his blessings instead of sheep,” Irving Berlin having become his spiritual advisor (one could do worse).

The message is clear in the White Christmas story: The arts can save you, even your business. In these uncertain times Millerd gives us the simple story of increasing economic activity: increase support of the arts and the arts will save your business, even your government.

The Art’s Club’s White Christmas should be required attendance for all those crafty BC provincial government officials who decided to cut the arts funding to shreds because they have come up short on planning and on smarts. Performers and other artists and technicians must keep working in order to keep their skills growing. That is simple capitalism 101. This White Christmas knows that and Bill Millerd said as much at the opening night.

Far from being a lesson in economics, this is a lesson in enjoyment. Let the fun shine on through. Fun is a component of what it means to be human, we are reminded.

This new stage version takes the framework of the 1954 film and develops it further, adding some new romance threads and packing in even more Irving Berlin songs. The second act, for instance, now opens with a tap-dance extravaganza around Berlin’s “I Love a Piano.”

“It’s not complicated,” the highly talented Sara-Jeanne Hosie said this week. “You sit in the theatre, you listen to the music, the story is easy and simple. I think it’s a lovely two hours.”

When fun is presented this well it is irresistible and infectious. I have been guilty of thinking each year as this film slips on to the small screen that White Christmas was about white people having a Pollyanna view of life and how everything can be fixed easily with a song. But the number one error an audience member can make is to not let the infectious music just take over during the first few minutes on a 1944 battlefield full of US troops on Christmas Eve.

Imagine what it is like for the performers: When you walk out on the stage and have a song in your heart, you just gotta sing. You take another look at the script that leads to the song and give it authenticity, actually acting through it and then you sing with meaning and dramatic definition. There is one perfect world in which that perfect song will take you and the audience. It is the perfect world of the musical. Like a box of perfect chocolates, perfect musicals also melt in the mouth.

As well, you can throw in abundant articulate tap dancing by a troop of magic troopers—the Stanley’s ensemble is fun-loving and convincingly involved in the show that is going to save the good General Waverly’s failing vacation destination.

There is the musical and there is the comedy. All the White Christmas actors know how to build the rhythm, deliver the punch lines. And to quote from Cabaret, “Even the orchestra is beautiful!” The former Stanley Theatre sound problems, when the orchestra was more or less piped in from another room, are now mostly solved with the live presence of acoustic frankness, the small but full-sound band is really a vital character in the production. Gotta love that orchestra pit. You and I and the performers are truly inside a musical.

At the end you want the entertainment to go on for another hour.

The facts:

Starring Sara-Jeanne Hosie, Monique Lund, Todd Talbot, Jeffrey Victor, and Susan Anderson, Réjean Cournoyer, Mark Weatherly, with Robert Allan, Jak Barradell, Darren Burkett, Adam Charles, Anna Kuman, Jeremy Lowe, Kristie Marsden, Marianne McCord, Laura McNaught, Keri Minty, Shane Snow, Fiona Vroom, Rachael Withers 
Director Bill Millerd

Musical Director Bruce Kellett

Choreographer Valerie Easton
Set

Design Alison Green

Lighting Design Marsha Sibthorpe

Costume Design Sheila White

Sound Design Andrew Tugwell

Irving Berlin's White Christmas: The Musical

Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage, 2750 Granville Street

                Now to December 27, 2009

Monday at 8 pm, Tuesday at 7:30 pm, Wednesday–Saturday at 8 pm, and Wednesday & Saturday at 2 pm

Tickets are $25, $45, and $64, inclusive of all tax and fees.

Call the Arts Club Box Office at 604.687.1644 or visit artsclub.com

Same-Day student tickets for $20 studentrush.com

Sponsored by TD Canada Trust