A HARMONY BOYS CHRISTMAS: LIVE FROM WAIKIKI BEACH!

The Harmony Boys throw good taste out the window, and thank Santa for that, as Bobby, Barry, Billy, and Xian Ling Moon Harmony reunite at the Grand Kahulahani Resort And Sacred Indigenous Burial Grounds for “some Christmas cheer, some song and dance, and some very poorly researched appropriation of Pacific Island culture” in A Harmony Boys Christmas: Live From Waikiki Beach, Aaron Matijasic’s gift to L.A. theatergoers in search of politically incorrect, R-rated fun for the holidays.

Best known to moviegoers for 1955’s Boy-Wrecked*, the tale of four teenagers who get shipwrecked on the wrong side of Party Island, The Harmony Boys are every right-winger’s dream quartet. (They did, after all, volunteer their own tour bus to drive local businessmen to work during the Montgomery bus boycotts.)

Tonight, however, the focus is on Christmas as Matijasic’s Billy, Al Rahn’s Bobby, Gabriel Oliva’s Barry, and Mike Hoy’s Xian Ling Moon are joined by Billy’s tightly-coiffed wife Ruth (Amanda Hootman) and their two “aggressively disappointing” children Joey (Danny Domroy) and Louise (Camdyn Wren), curvy blonde backup singers The Harmonettes (Heather Roberts, Jenna Townsend, and Whitney Vigil), Pupui The Island Boy (Everjohn Feliciano), aka Brown Snowman, and a swimsuit-clad Santa named Morty (Christopher Lee Lemay) in a holiday fundraiser for Force Feed The World.

Among the evening’s highlights is a full-cast Nativity Pageant as recounted in The United States Department Of Defense Freedom Bible and featuring none other than Baby Jesus himself. (“Just in case there’s any confusion in the future, he’s definitely white.”)

Live commercials have The Harmonettes singing the merits of Budweiser, Coppertone, Halo Shampoo, and Roto Rooter. (“Give your pipes an involuntary enema.”)

And in case you’ve got a wife who’s “unmanageably emotional, unreasonable, and generally crazy,” Ruth is there to promote Cray Away. (“Just one a day keeps the cray away.”)

Along the way, live televised reports from Gil Gillespie at Kakahaku Harbor reveal more than a few shameful secrets the quartet would much rather remain unspoken while on stage a Harmony Boys Beauty Pageant pits three comely audience contestants against each other for the coveted sash.

 Most importantly, the Harmony Boys harmonize, from hits made famous by the Andrews Sisters (“Christmas Island,” “Jing-A-Ling Jing-A-Ling”) and Harry Belafonte (“Mary’s Boy Child”) to their own original “Ho Ho Homeless Santa” and “Cloudy With A Chance Of Harmony,” all of them accompanied by musical director Ben Stanton and the evening’s fabulous five-piece band, musical arrangements by Jason Currie and Rahn.

Choreographer Jen Oundjian spices things up with some not-so-subtly suggestive boy band moves in “The More You Give (The More You’ll Have)” before she has Billy doing the unspeakable to the tune of “Christmas Needs Love to Be Christmas.”

And even though “White Christmas” goes out of its way to celebrate a time not so long ago “when everyone was white” and even though a patriotic “Fly Our Flag For Christmas” unabashedly supports those who “stand up and fight for Christmas with the American flag right beside them,” you might just witness a few flag-wavers skipping out at intermission. (Go figure.)

 Those who stick around for both acts will experience double the guilty pleasures that writer Matijasic and ace director Jaime Robledo have in store, among them one delectable performance after another, from Matijasic’s hilariously henpecked Billy to Rahn’s wonderfully wacky Bobby to Oliva’s fabulously flamboyant Barry to Hoy’s adorably Asiatic Xian Ling Moon … with plenty of razor-sharp four-part harmonies along the way,

 Hootman is a haughty hoot-and-a-half as the coloratura-piped Ruth, Feliciano makes for a beatifically winning Pupui, Lemay creates a crusty crabapple of a Morty, Domroy and Wren are deadpan delights as Billy and Ruth’s spawn, and Roberts, Townsend, and Vigil are as glamouricious as they are golden-throated.

Currie, Victor Isaac, and Tammy Munro score plenty of laughs in prerecorded black-and-white video sequences shot and edited by Hoy.

 DeAnne Millais’s Technicolor-hued island nightclub set, Linda Muggeridge’s imaginatively offbeat early-‘60s costumes, and Matt Richter’s zesty lighting design make A Harmony Boys Christmas: Live From Waikiki Beach look like $123,320. (That’s a cool million in 2018.)

A Harmony Boys Christmas: Live From Waikiki Beach is produced by Jon Tosetti and Hootman. Beth Scorzato is stage manager. Sidney Baldwin and Nevada Brandt are Harmonettes swings. Projections are by Brian Wallis.

 For those grown sick and tired of the squeaky-clean Plaids of Plaid Tidings fame, A Harmony Boys Christmas: Live From Waikiki Beach proves the exhilaratingly astringent holiday-season antidote. Just be sure to leave all sense of decency and decorum at the door.

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The Broadwater Mainstage, 6322 Santa Monica Boulevard, Hollywood.
https://theharmonyboys.brownpapertickets.com

–Steven Stanley
December 9, 2018
Photos: Matt Kamimura Photography
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