Long Beach is the place be for Golden Era Hollywood-style holiday entertainment this week and next as Musical Theatre West offers L.A. audiences their very first look at the 2016 Broadway crowd-pleaser Holiday Inn.

Like the Oscar-winning 1942 Fred Astaire/Bing Crosby/Irving Berlin classic on which it is based (but fast-forwarded to post-WWII 1947), Holiday Inn has popular song-and-dance threesome Jim Hardy, Ted Hanover, and Lila Mason parting ways when singer Jim opts to exit the biz for life on a Connecticut farm, leaving it up to Ted and Lila to keep the act going as a boy-girl duo.

Unfortunately for our well-meaning hero, it doesn’t take Jim long to a) figure out he wasn’t meant to till the soil and b) decide to convert his rural abode into Holiday Inn, so named because it will be only open for entertainment on Valentine’s Day, Easter, The Fourth Of July, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, and other assorted jours de fête.

With just two other characters making the crossing from celluloid to stage (the lovely Linda Mason and Jim and Ted’s agent/manager Danny), Holiday Inn The Musical does pretty much its own original thing from start to finish, and that means transforming Linda from aspiring performer to small-town schoolteacher, adding precocious tween messenger boy Charlie to the mix, and substituting a butch-gal farmhand named Louise Badger for the film’s black housekeeper Mamie, played perhaps not coincidentally by African-American trailblazer Louise Beavers.

While most of the movie’s songs, chief among them “Easter Parade,” “Happy Holiday,” and “White Christmas,” have made the journey from screen to stage, that’s not all the Irving Berlin you’ll be hearing at the Carpenter Center.

“Heat Wave,” “Blue Skies,” “Cheek To Cheek,” “It’s A Lovely Day Today,” “Steppin’ Out with My Baby,” and a half-dozen more Berlin standards evoke memories of Call Me Madam, Easter Parade, Top Hat, and other Broadway/Hollywood hits.

All of this adds up to a stage adaptation/jukebox musical that feels both classic (as in “They don’t write’em like that anymore”) and contemporary, thanks in large part to book writers Gordon Greenberg and Chad Hodge, whose snappy patter feels as “today” as the latest Broadway blockbuster while at the same time paying tribute to its mid-20th-century source material.

Danny Pelzig directs for Musical Theatre West with a particularly deft touch as choreographer Christine Neghberbon earns A+ after A+ for the most exciting ensemble dance numbers you’ll see all holiday season, from tap (“Blue Skies”) to Latin (“Heatwave”) to jazz (“Shaking The Blues Away”) to everything in between, and that doesn’t count duo/trio dances like a hilariously cheeky “Cheek To Cheek,” whose sudden style/tempo changes give an unsuspecting Ted and Linda the dance workout of their lives.

Local discovery-turned-Broadway star Cameron Bond makes for the most dynamic of golden-throated leading men as Jim, Southland returnee Natalie Storrs is feisty perfection (and sings up a storm) as girl-next-door Linda, and SoCal favorite Jeffrey Scott Parsons once again proves himself the consummate song-and-dance man as Ted.

Liz Eldridge’s Louise gives the late great Mary Wickes and/or Marjorie Main a run for their wise-cracking money, Jennifer Knox makes Lila such a dancing firecracker it’s a shame we don’t get to see more of her in Act Two, Jeff Skowron is a Yiddish-spouting delight as Danny, and 12-year-old David Landis gives young Charlie Winslow chutzpah galore.

Last but not least, there’s no harder-working or more multi-talented, multi-tasking song-and-dance ensemble in town than Lucas Blankenhorn, Carlin Castellano, dance captain Maggie Darago, Fatima El-Bashir, Chaz Feuerstine, Sylvie Gosse, Carly Haig, Patrick Heffernan, Katie Marshall, Gabriel Navarro, Linda Neel, Erik Scott Romney, Clay Stefanki, Adam Stern-Rand, Stephanie Urko, and Landon Zwick.

Indeed my only complaint with MTW’s latest is its minimal diversity in casting, particularly compared to the Broadway original, which featured African-American Corbin Bleu as Ted and Asian-American Morgan Gao as Charlie, and that’s not counting the chorus.

Musical director Dennis Castellano elicits uniformly stellar vocal performances while conducting a pit orchestra to match Broadway’s best.

Holiday Inn looks just as fabulous as it sounds on Anna Louizos’s original Broadway sets with cast members sporting Alejo Vietti’s gorgeous original Broadway costumes (with special snaps to some of the most outrageously over-the-top Easter bonnets ever), with Paul Black (lighting), Julie Ferrin (sound), Dylan Powell (props), and Michon Gruber-Gonzales (wigs) completing the all-around top-drawer design team.

Tamara Becker is costume coordinator. Kevin Clowes is technical director. Matt Terzigni is production manager. Shay Garber is production stage manager and Kathryn Davies is assistant stage manager. Bren Thor is company manager.

With Broadway’s White Christmas now embarked on its 12th National Tour and regional White Christmases once again filling theaters from coast to coast, Irving Berlin lovers could not ask for a more welcome December alternative to that other Berlin musical than Holiday Inn. Simply put, it’s the Inn place to be this Holiday season.

Musical Theatre West, Richard and Karen Carpenter Performing Arts Center, 6200 Atherton St., Long Beach.
www.musical.org

–Steven Stanley
December 6, 2019
Photos: Caught In The Moment Photography

Tags: Irving Berlin, Los Angeles Theater Review, Musical Theatre West