Elf The Musical, the cheery – very, very cheery – revival opening tonight for a limited holiday run on Broadway, is an entirely suitable gift from a hard-working cast for fans of the well-liked 2003 Will Ferrell Christmas perennial. If you crack up at memories of Mr. Narwhal (here represented by a large tusk rising from the orchestra pit as the conductor intones, “Bye Buddy, hope you find your dad!”), Elf has your tinseled name on it.
For the everyone else – adults anyway – the updated Elf remains as much a mixed bag as it was during its previous two Broadway stagings in 2010 and 2012, with one major improvement: Grey Henson, the immensely likable, pitched-to-the-rafters firecracker from Mean Girls and Shucked, steps as easily into Buddy’s green winklepickers as Cinderella ever did a glass slilpper.
Henson and the rest of the cast (actually, the rest of the production) go big and loud in the style of children’s theater, with no joke (including some obviously recent additions) or emotion underplayed. At two hours and 30 minutes, that’s a lot of big. Wearying big.
But the creative team behind this adaptation – Philip Wm. McKinley directs, with a book by Thomas Meehan and Bob Martin and music by Matthew Sklar and Chad Begueli – pull off a neat trick in the final scenes, brightening the show’s pace and delivering Elf‘s best moments. Among others, there’s a knock-out duet (“There Is A Santa Claus”) sung by two of the production’s finest singers (Ashley Brown and young Kai Edgar as the mother and son in Buddy the Elf’s newfound human family), and Santa’s amusingly lurching sleigh ride over the front rows of the audience (think Back To The Future‘s DeLorean as if replicated for one of those quarter-a-ride gizmos outside supermarkets).
Grey Henson and Sean Astin
Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade
The storyline hews to the movie: A motherless human baby has been raised as an elf in the North Pole by Santa and his helpers. Now 30 (and very tall) Buddy finally learns the truth and sets out to find his biological father (who never knew he existed). A trek to New York City – in elf garb and with a childlike demeanor that, oddly enough, the other adult elves don’t seem to retain – brings about the expected developments as Buddy charms the cynical city folk (McKinley directs his cast to speak in the broadest Nu Yawk accents possible) with his joyous Christmas spirit, though dad (Michael Hayden) is a tougher sell. A wealthy, workaholic publisher of children’s books, Walter Hobbs isn’t quite the “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner” of Dickens, but he’ll do for now.
Mostly Walter is just a bad dad, emotionally distant from his loving wife, 10-year-old son (the aforementioned Brown and Edgar) and, now, his new elf-son, who makes a mess of things at dad’s office just when the holiday work crunch is most demanding.
There’s also a love interest (Kayla Davion, another powerhouse vocalist), a persnickety boss (Kalen Allen) at Macy’s, where Buddy temporarily lands at gig at Santa Land; and, of course, Santa himself (a terrific Sean Astin, having what seems to be the time of his life, not least when he gets to make a cute joke about Lord of the Rings).
With a happy ending guaranteed – it’s a Christmas story, after all – Elf relies less on plot (which there’s too much of) and more on tinsel, lights and candy cane spectacle. On that level, this production, which has been staged to packed houses for the past two holiday seasons in London, is fitfully successful. Tim Goodchild’s set design begins on the chintzy side, with, for example, Santa, on an otherwise bare stage, sitting on a throne that wouldn’t pass muster at most shopping malls, and Buddy riding off on a refrigerator-sized iceberg (Ian William Galloway’s cartoony, mostly charming video projections pull a lot of weight).
Kai Edgar and Henson
Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade
The set design comes into its own during the big Macy’s Santa Land scene and, later, a snowy finale (it’s pretty clear where this production spends its money), and Goodchild’s costume design is strong throughout (even if its not always clear exactly what decade we’re supposed to be in). Liam Steel’s choreography is sufficiently energetic, even occasionally witty (as with some sly Fosse references during the “Nobody Cares About Santa” number performed as a Christmas Eve late-night gathering of sad-sack newly out-of-work Clauses).
Throughout the production, the sprightly dancing, not to mention Henson’s inexhaustible high spirits, adds some kick to a pleasant if mostly unremarkable score. Songwriters Sklar and Beguelin would, after Elf, go on to compose the much superior The Prom. We owe them a sugar plum for that alone.
Title: Elf The Musical
Venue: Broadway’s Marquis Theatre
Director: Philip Wm. McKinley
Book: Thomas Meehan and Bob Martin
Music: Matthew Sklar and Chad Begueli
Cast: Grey Henson, Sean Astin, Kayla Davion, Michael Hayden, Ashley Brown, Kai Edgar, Jennifer Sanchez, Kalen Allen, Michael Deaner
Running time: 2 hr 30 min (including intermission)