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music and lyrics by Irving Berlin, book by David Ives & Paul Blake, directed by Michael Lichtefeld

Drayton Entertainment, Dunfield Theatre, Cambridge

November 20-December 20, 2015

“Blue skies / Smiling at me

Nothing but blue skies / Do I see”

If you’re looking for a holiday show to make your spirits brights, you need look no further than Irving Berlin’s White Christmas, now playing at the Dunfield Theatre Cambridge through December 20.  When the show played Drayton Entertainment’s St. Jacobs Country Playhouse in 2013, it generated such enthusiastic word of mouth that I was sorry to have missed it.  Now Drayton has remounted the show in Cambridge with virtually the entire 2013 cast and creative team intact.  It’s clear why it was so popular.  The show is a joy from beginning to end.

White Christmas is, of course, best known as a movie from 1954 starring Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye.  The movie was not adapted for the stage until 2004 by David Ives and Paul Blake.  Though no one can replace the movie’s two leading men, the stage adaptation is in some ways more satisfying than the movie in that it omits the movie’s less savoury aspects, like the minstrel show sequence.  It includes nearly all the songs in the movie, such all-time favourites as “Blue Skies”, “Sisters”, Count Your Blessings” and, of course, the title song.  Plus the stage version adds in even more songs by Berlin from other sources such as “Happy Holidays”, “Let Yourself Go”, “I Love a Piano”, “Falling Out of Love Can Be Fun” and “How Deep Is the Ocean”.  

Fans of the film need not worry because Ives and Blake’s new libretto follows the film quite closely.  The main changes are that instead of Bob Wallace and Phil Davis making it big on Broadway, they appear on the Ed Sullivan Show and General Waverly’s housekeeper is elevated to the role of concierge and the part boosted into a singing role.

Otherwise, the plot is the same.  We first meet the two male stars when they are putting on a Christmas show in Europe in 1944.  Bob Wallace (Jeff Irving) is a captain and Phil Davis (Kyle Blair) is a private while their much-respected superior is Major General Henry Waverly (Victor A. Young).  Waverly wonders in his Christmas Eve speech what the world will be like in ten years. 

We soon find out.  Wallace and Davis have become a successful song-and-dance team and are looking for a sister act to be in their new show.  At a nightclub they find just the thing with the Haynes Sisters, Betty (Jayme Armstrong) and Judy (Rachel Crowther).  Phil and Judy immediately fall in love, while Bob and Betty can only snipe at each other.  Since the sisters are booked to perform at the Columbia Inn in Vermont, Phil secretly switches his ticket and Bob’s from Florida to Vermont.  Upon arrival, Phil and Bob discover the inn is owned by now-retired General Waverly and run by his concierge Martha Watson (Jane Lewis), who has been trying to hide from him how deep in debt the inn has sunk.  The lack of snow for the holidays means the inn has no guests and paying the four entertainers will only put Waverly further into the red. 

To solve the problem, the four entertainers hit on that old standby of movie musicals – “Let’s put on a show!” – and the plot runs its familiar course.  Ives and Blake’s new book even includes the misheard gossip about Phil and Bob’s plans supposedly to take over the inn, an artificial fillip used to keep the story rolling for another half hour.  No one will mind that artifice, however, since it leads to so many more great songs and dance numbers.

Drayton has managed to reassemble the entire core cast that made the show such a hit in 2013, including Anna Bartlam, now 11, who plays Susan Waverly, the General’s granddaughter.  Yet, not only is the core cast strong, so is the entire ensemble.  Jeff Irving, familiar from such musicals as The Light in the Piazza at the Shaw Festival in 2013, is given some of the most famous Berlin songs like “Blue Skies”, “Count Your Blessings” and “How Deep Is the Ocean” and delivers them with nuance and and emotion.  Having heard him mostly in new musicals, it was a pleasure to hear how the richness of his voice and attention to the words suits the old standards so perfectly.

Kyle Blair, who showed off his fantastic tap skills in 42nd Street at Stratford in 2012, disappointingly had no dancing to do at the Shaw Festival this year.  He makes up for that now with virtually every one of his songs and with two big numbers imaginatively choreographed by Michael Lichtefeld.  The first, “The Best Things Happen While You're Dancing”, lives up to its title when Lichtefeld has Blair and Crowther dance in a whole variety of ballroom dances to an extended orchestral version of the song.  Act 2 starts out with the hottest number in the show, “I Love a Piano”, where Blair, Crowther and the ensemble serve up a feast of tap dancing to equal anything in 42nd Street. 

Jayme Armstrong, who has starred in Mary Poppins and The Little Mermaid for Drayton, is well paired with Rachel Crowther, who happens to have also been in Stratford’s 42nd Street.  Crowther’s Judy is extroverted and optimistic as opposed to Armstrong’s Betty who is introverted and skeptical.  Both are perfectly matched with the male leads – Crowther equalling Blair in energy and precision, Armstrong equalling Irving in smouldering emotion.  Armstrong sizzles with passion and pain in the torch song “Love, You Didn’t Do Right By Me”.

Real-life husband and wife Victor A. Young and Jayne Lewis once played the leads in Kiss Me, Kate at Stratford in 1989.  They still have the same to-and-fro rapport as General Waverly and his concierge who might as well be married but aren’t.  Young paints Waverly as a sincere man, who tries with difficulty to laugh away his financial difficulties.  Ives and Blake have enlarged the role of Martha Watson (called Emma Allen in the film) by making her a former Broadway singer who longs to be in the show.  This adds comedy and gives Lewis the chance to belt out “Let Me Sing and I’m Happy” like Ethel Merman.  In fact, though, Lewis’s voice is heard to better effect when she sings a reprise of the song in her natural voice just afterwards.

Among the rest of the cast Anna Bartlam is delightful as Susan and manages to avoid all the pitfalls of cutsieness that could attend the role.  Kyle Golemba, Caitlin Goguen and Melanie McInenly help make the stereotypes of the nervous stage manager and air-headed chorus girls seem fresh.  As Ralph Sheldrake, Mike Jackson serves a pillar of stability in the midst of the whirl of showbiz.

Faced with a musical that trades liberally in sentiment and nostalgia, Michael Lichtefeld, who directed such fine shows at Stratford as My One and Only and South Pacific, knows exactly the right course to take.  To pitch the show toward camp would ruin it.  To emphasize the sentimentality would make it sickly sweet.  What Lichtefeld does is to have his cast play their parts with complete earnestness and sincerity, an approach that helps lend depth to the comedy.

Those who saw this joyful show in 2013 will certainly want to see it again.  Those who did not, should definitely not miss it this time around.  With an ideal cast, lively choreography and sensitive direction, this is a Christmas show that will have you smiling the whole season long. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Cast of Irving Berlin’s White Christmas; Rachel Crowther, Kyle Blair, Jeff Irving and Jayme Armstrong. ©2015 Gary Moon.

For tickets, visit www.draytonentertainment.com.