Santa, Baby

Santa, Baby is a two-night season of a collection of eight ten-minute skits inspired by Christmas songs (few of which appear in the production), following hard on the heels (by an hour) of Budding Theatre’s most recent production, The Night Before Christmas.

For performances mostly using actors of limited experience to stage scripts developed on a shoestring and staged on a short production schedule, on the whole the skits showed surprising ability to rouse laughter from a willing audience.

As you might expect, few skits offered real scope for any actor to descend deep into his or her stage persona.  That said, Kate Roediger’s “Mother and Child” and Frances McNair’s first script, “Christmas Cheers”, provided scope for real word fun, with Dominic Mico’s direction giving “Mother and Child” inherent immediacy; and Harriet Elvin’s “Christmas in Yorkshire” gave free rein to its actresses’ Yorkshire accents and attitudes in recapitulating a Monty Python skit about how poor their childhoods had been.  Finally, Adele Lewin’s titular character in “The Christmas Fairy”, which Lewin co-wrote with Nigel Palfreman, painted a convincing and moving picture of how it is to be left literally on the shelf.

Appearing to hold all of this together on stage — and certainly maintaining flow from one skit to the next — was the performance, both natural and consistently amusing, of the show’s MC, Jasper Lindell, whose short contributions alone made the show worth going to see.

John P. Harvey

Images: Felicity Knott and Philip Meddows, in “Statistically Speaking”, Santa, Baby.  Photographer: Greg Gould.

Adele Lewin, in “The Christmas Fairy”, Santa, Baby.  Photographer: John P. Harvey.