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by Tim Drucker, Bonnie Milligan & Joel Waggoner, directed by Tim Drucker

Paquin Entertainment, The Royal Theatre, 608 College Street, Toronto

November 25, 2025-January 4, 2026

“It Feels Like Christmas Because It Is Literally Christmas”

The Unauthorized Hallmark(ish) Parody Musical, now having its world premiere, is an enjoyable(ish) show that skewers the clichés in the profusion of Christmas-themed movies that deck the halls of streaming services. To date Hallmark alone has produced over 500 Christmas movies. Just this year the Hallmark Channel will debut 24 original holiday movies. What is the point? What is the appeal? Who watches these things? These are questions that Hallmark(ish), as I will call it for short, never deals with. Hallmark(ish) focusses on telling a story typical of the genre spiced with a number of clever songs. In general, the show needs some trimming and punching up to reach a higher level of satire and hilarity.

The story concerns Holly, an executive of a company in Big City, who has been told by by her male chauvinist boss to complete a merger with a Chinese company by Christmas Eve. Holly thinks she will have to stay in Big City to complete the job when a phone call from her mother Merry, whose heart has been stopping recently, convinces Holly to leave the job to her capable assistant and return to her hometown Small Town to help her mother at Christmas.

There she runs into her old high school flame Mark Hall (get it?), who is not only a lumberjack but the town’s sheriff. Mark is also a widower with a daughter and hence is available again. Will old sparks ignite? Meanwhile, Merry has enough work managing the general store and her eleven other jobs, but what she is most focussed on is winning the town’s annual Christmas cookie contest which has been won for the past ten years by Merry’s arch-rival Cookie. Everyone knows that Cookie only wins because the same person, Cody, has been judge, but will anyone come along to expose this corruption?

Hallmark(ish) hits all the main tropes of Christmas movies, especially the notion that life in a small town as a wife would be more fulfilling than life as an executive in a big city. The song “Love or Career” sets out this dilemma nicely of which kind of life to choose with women of the Small Town chiming in with examples of how much happier they are now that they gave up their jobs to be married. Hallmark(ish) also trashes the common theme of rekindling old flames by showing that Mark may still be the hunk he was in high school, but in terms of intelligence he is not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

The parts of the show that tend to jar are those devoted to the rivalry of Cookie and Merry. If Cookie always wins because the contest always has the same judge, why does Merry, or anyone in the town, enter the contest? Tim Drucker, author of the book, seems to confuse pantos with parody by making Cookie into a pantomime villain, complete with trademark gestures, songs lauding her evilness and insults of audience members. It’s fun to engage the audience but each time this happens the show veers off course into quite different, non-Hallmark(ish) territory. The contest’s disruption by a moose gone loose (the possibility of which should have been introduced earlier) feels like a device to pad out the story for a longer running time.

The songs are of variable quality. “Love or Career” sets out the advantages of love (i.e., marriage) over career with daft examples of women with increasingly exceptional jobs who happily gave them up to settle down and have children. In “My Dead Wife Is Dead”, Mark sings his sad story of his late wife in country-western style where each stanza, but the last, leads to a statement of what she didn’t die of. Best of all, however, is the concluding upbeat number “It Feels Like Christmas Because It Is Literally Christmas” that mocks all the Christmas songs that tautologically state that Christmas is the happiest time of the year because it is the happiest time of the year.

The cast is well chosen. Alexandra Clementi has a strong voice as Holly, able to bring home her biggest numbers and able to deliver the dialogue with just the right level of irony. The women in the audience the night I attended certainly were on her side and cheered wildly when Holly made her final choice between love and career.

Sean Meldrum is very funny as Mark. He has the hunkiness of Mark down, but even better is how well he play’s Mark’s utter cluelessness. Meldrum has perfected such a vacant stare that he makes it believable that Mark generally forgets that he has a daughter.

As Merry, Emily Richardson conveys such warmth and motherliness that she could easily play her parody character in a real Hallmark movie. One flaw of Drucker’s book is that we hear so much about Merry’s heart condition at the beginning we expect something will happen later related to it, yet nothing does.

Heidi Michelle Thomas is a vampish Cookie. Drucker as director is quite content to have Thomas play the role as far over the top as she wants and to play most of her scenes directly to the audience. Those ploys are what give Cookie the effect of a panto villain rather than the blocking figure in a Hallmark movie, even though Cookie as a character does not really block the flow of the plot in any way.

The hardest-working performer in the show is Luke Witt who plays over 20 different characters undergoing multiple quick changes off stage. He mostly plays female characters like Martha, Holly’s impossible efficient assistant, and all the female members of Small Town who are not Merry or Cookie. His largest role is as Cody, the judge of the Christmas Cookie Contest. In the show, Cody states that Cookie blackmailed him into giving her first prize each year although we never learn what she was blackmailing him about. Is it because he’s gay? Not likely since Hallmark has produced several gay-themed Christmas movies like The Holiday Sitter (2022). Is it because of his love of poppers? Again, not likely, since only sales, but not possession or use, are illegal in Canada.

The choreography of Brooke Engen and Tiffany Engen is not remarkable but it does give swings Alyssa Lyn and Levi Stepp a chance to show off their talent since they consistently outshine the main cast in every dance number.

Hallmark(ish) is staged in The Royal Cinema, an Art Deco movie theatre from 1939. As one might expect in a movie theatre, the stage is quite shallow and the seating is not raked as much as it would be in a theatre meant for live performance. The background to all the minimal sets is projected onto an arch within the proscenium and on a screen behind this arch. Two doors are set into the arch on either side. The arch is not so secure that it doesn’t wobble every time someone closes a door. As a musical the main deficit is that all the accompanying music is pre-recorded.

Hallmark Christmas movies are so clichéd and unrealistic already that they are comic just the way they are. Just think of the preposterous Hot Frosty from last year where a hapless young woman falls in love with a snowman who comes to life. What Hallmark(ish) does best is to point out the conservative, traditionalist bias in such family films. If the parody had been even more pointed, the dialogue wittier, the plot tighter and the music live, Hallmark(ish) could be funnier and less fluffy than it is.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Levi Stepp, Heidi Michelle Thomas as Cookie, Alyssa Lyn, Luke Witt as Cody, Alexandra Clementi as Holly, Emily Richardson as Merry, and Sean Meldrum as Mark; Sean Meldrum as Mark and Alexandra Clementi as Holly; Heidi Michelle Thomas as Cookie and Luke Witt as Cody. © 2025 Door 24.

For tickets visit: hallmarkish.com.