Photo by Carol Rosegg.

An ever-growing subgenre has emerged within the movie adaptation umbrella constantly covering Broadway: the holiday movie adaptation. In addition to Elf and White Christmas, both making return engagements this season, A Christmas Story, The Musical, the earnest adaptation of the cult film that grew into a yuletide tradition, has arrived for a limited engagement at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre.

Joseph Robinette has drawn the show’s book from Leigh Brown, Bob Clark and Jean Shepherd’s script for the 1983 film, itself lifted from Shepherd’s anthology “In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash,” and kept nearly all the film’s beloved vignettes intact (the only thing excised appears to be an Ovaltine-related sequence). He has also, with the sturdy help of director John Rando and music writers Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, maintained Shepherd’s sweet sense of nostalgia and innocence. It convincingly evokes a time when bullies still fought with their hands and the Red Ryder BB gun nine-year-old Ralphie (an able Johnny Rabe, alternating in the role with Joe West) could be seen only as a danger to himself (you hear the refrain “You’ll shoot your eye out” many a time) rather than a menace to society. It’s a time when the authority of teachers still went un-impugned by both students and their parents, and when love was enough to keep the home fires burning, even in a Depression-era Indiana small town.

That love is supplied in ample doses by Ralphie’s Mother (Erin Dilly, wonderful) and father, The Old Man, (John Bolton, humorously turning what was more of a curmudgeon in the film into a dexterously manic onstage creation), as well as by Ralphie’s button-cute kid brother, Randy (Zac Ballard). As played by a charming Dan Lauria – himself the paterfamilias of TV’s The Wonder Years, which knew a thing or two about narration and nostalgia – Shepherd narrates the events of the month leading up to Ralphie’s favorite holiday, Christmas, which include contending with the school bully, a visit to see a department store Santa Claus, the arrival of a curious novelty lamp, The Old Man’s colorful vernacular, his contention with a couple of neighborhood dogs, and the misguided dare of one of Ralphie’s friends to stick his tongue to a frozen pole, in addition to his quest to find that prized gun underneath the Christmas tree.

Robinette transfers all of these events from the movie, and the results fare better than most works that try to mimeograph the events of one genre onto enough (see: the musical version Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown). The narrative flow is sometimes a bit forced but never clunky, and its episodic structure is fitting, given that it derives from the mind of a young child. It also gives Robinette and the team of Pasek and Paul the opportunity to expand Ralphie’s daydreams, Pennies From Heaven-style, into some elaborate and unexpected musical numbers. This includes a Western-themed “Ralphie to the Rescue” and “You’ll Shoot Your Eye Out.” The latter takes place, perhaps improbably, in a speakeasy (with the children in the cast dressed as adults and doing most of the dancing, “Bugsy Malone”-style), yet it shows off both Caroline O’Connor, as Ralphie’s teacher, Miss Shields, and wunderkind youngster Luke Spring in an exciting dance number. Throughout the show, choreographer Warren Carlyle devises thoughtful dance numbers that boasts the skills of his young cast without over-challenging them, and Rando makes the task of working with kid actors look like child’s play.

Pasek and Paul, who just recently proved in the Second Stage Theatre production of Dogfight a perceptive ability to thread music with narrative, setting and emotion, have crafted an enjoyable and appropriate pastiche score, although none really linger in the mind after the applause has wound down. Still, Dilly tackles her two numbers, “What a Mother Does” and the Big-recalling “Just Like That,” with such warmth and clarion delivery, one would be fool not to wish for everyone to have a mother like her. Bolton is a comic delight, mastering a plethora of physical demands in his role. Even Lauria goes the extra mile, fills his merely perfunctory role with real pathos. Christmas doesn’t aim to raise the bar, but it’s a charming callback to the comforts of both family and the traditional book musical.

A Christmas Story, The Musical

Lunt-Fontanne Theater, 205 West 46th Street, www.achristmasstorythemusical.com. Through Dec. 30.

Gossip and Xenomania make joyful noise

By Ben Kessler

Arkansas-bred indie band Gossip (née The Gossip; like Facebook, they dropped the definite article) came to A Joyful Noise, their fifth studio album, having exhausted the exhortative possibilities of millennial dance-punk. Ahead of the pop culture curve, singer Beth Ditto went the distance—shorter than it seems—from subaltern militant (2006’s Standing in the Way of Control) to prophet of boho-hipster liberation (2009’s Music for Men).

The band’s breakout single, “Standing in the Way of Control,” was celebrated for its punk progressivism vis-à-vis gay marriage. Just as audacious but much less straightforward, A Joyful Noise is in sync with our current conflicted—ahem, “evolved”—cultural moment.

Gossip made an unequivocal break with the recent past when they decamped from producer Mark Ronson’s studio to work with Brian Higgins, founder of hitmaking outfit Xenomania. Ditto has said of Ronson, “We had all the same reference points.” Indeed, Ronson’s sampling sensibility curates pop music history according to a consistent hierarchy of “underground” values. He goes at his business with an undisguised sincere belief in the purity, the authenticity, that cultural history lends to certain sounds.

Higgins has no such belief. His is a synthesizing sensibility. Higgins and his collaborators put all of pop in the hopper. In its production for acts such as Saint Etienne, Girls Aloud  and Florrie, Xenomania uses eclecticism for scale.

The key to the Xenomania genius lies in tailoring excess: knowing when too much is just right vs. when it really is too much. Clearly, Higgins’  philosophy is that a strong topline melody exerts discipline downward and no effect that serves to impress the melody deeper into the listener’s consciousness should be questioned.

So, yes, this is the full-on pop sound that Gossip have been tending toward for the last half-decade. But it’s not a cynical assault on the charts. When rock acts go pop, they often burrow all the way in as if to hide themselves, eliding the intermediate steps, the thought process that got them there. (Of course, that’s because, often, there is no thought process other than The Pet Shop Boys’ ironic rallying cry, “Let’s make lots of money.”)

A Joyful Noise, however, retains many of the ingredients of the familiar Gossip sound. By collaborating with Xenomania, Gossip embark on a (forgive me) epistemological adventure, detaching their sound from its obvious reference points and mining their punk inheritance to discover its deepest register of truth and meaning.

Tracks like “Get a Job” deviate from sentimentalized ideas about outsider authenticity. Where some might see a righteous affront to conformity, Ditto sees troubling inertia: “It was adorable when you were in your twenties/Not so cute anymore now that you’re pushing 30/Girl, you better get a job.” Much of the album flips Gossip’s previous rebel-rousing role to incite introspection rather than subcult rites of affirmation. The slow-building ballad “Casualties of War” looks beyond the political arrangement of gay love relationships to weigh serious consequences: “You lost the fight/I heard it was a good fight/The kind where no one wins and no one’s right.”

The closing track, “Love in a Foreign Place,” brings the theme of xenomania (love of all things foreign) to the forefront. It’s ironic that this album, not the purest representation of the signature Higgins sound, concludes with what may prove to be the definitive Xenomania song.

With a hook powered by triumphal, parallel bass and synth lines (classic Xenomania), the song fulfills the album’s title by heralding an expat state of being where there’s “so much to live for, so much to lose.” Recasting her personal history as existential narrative, Ditto exults in having overcome the limits of “life in a small town.” But “Love in a Foreign Place”—and the album as a whole—is anchored by the chastening awareness that anywhere can be a small town.

A Joyful Noise drives us back to those warring personal impulses that are the true origin and final testing ground of our politics.

My friend Barbara, who is a second generation Irish American, joined me for what turned out to be the fourth night of the American League

“Galway Hooker” has nothing to do with the oldest profession, but instead refers to a sailing boat used in Galway, Ireland.

playoffs. With a 12-by-9-feet high definition projection screen and 14 plasma televisions, we were going to get a taste of the sports bar experience. After some initial harried flyby service (the waiter brought us only one menu, and instead of the lengthy beer list I expected, he rattled off a half dozen beers), we mellowed out with our happy hour Blue Moons ($4). Barbara started chatting with our waiter to see where his accent was from (the Philippines). He was more attentive and we cut him some slack since he seemed to be the only waiter for the entire second floor, and had to keep running downstairs to the kitchen. Note to management: You need more than one person taking orders, especially on game night. Our guy even stopped mid-run to the first floor when he saw me looking for the bathroom and told me where to go.

We were getting hungry and although the goat cheese fritters ($11) almost lured me in, I decided to be a little healthy and shared the John Esty salad ($10) with Barbara. It had a couple of tweaks on the basic arugula salad, including grilled onions, avocado, red peppers and a spicy dressing. You wouldn’t think a pub would have an outstanding salad, but we both thought it tasted very fresh and left nothing on the plate.

After my brief flirtation with sensible eating, I followed with a big helping of the deep fried goodness of codfish and chips ($15). Barbara ordered the turkey meatloaf ($14), which was not a total winner. She loved the hot, buttered corn, but said the meatloaf, though chockfull of vegetables, was a bit bland and came to the table lukewarm. My fries were spot on, but I think the batter makes the dish; it would have been better with a crispier, thicker coating. We skipped dessert since we were loaded up with carbs and nobody goes to a pub for sweets.

We were finishing up just as baseball was getting underway. Neither of us is interested in the American League, but between the abundance of screens and the volume that reached every nook and cranny and probably the sidewalk, too, it felt like we were in the stadium. Don’t go to Galway Hooker expecting quiet conversation, but when you need to kick back with some beers and a burger, or relax after a few rounds of shopping, tie up your skiff on East 36th Street.

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Galway Hooker
7 E. 36th St.
212-725-2353
Entrees: $12 to $22

It’s smugness—unleavened by wit—that makes Goats so offensive. Clooney’s googly-eyed characterization as gung-ho army figure Lyn Cassady makes fun of the military with unthinking glee. Writer-director Grant Heslov (Clooney’s Goodnight and Good Luck collaborator) targets a covert Psy-Ops program that trains soldiers to use mind-control as a weapon—even against goats! Reporter Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) discovers this program and, from Ann Arbor, MI., to Kuwait City, follows the cartoonish tug-of-egos between an ex-hippie officer (Jeff Bridges) and a psychic (Kevin Spacey). Treating politics as a joke, Goats disregards life-and-death circumstances in favor of media-star righteousness.

Makavejev’s Man is Not a Bird, Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator and Innocence Unprotected are never so dull witted as to poke fun at bureaucratic pomposity. Instead, these films (each just over an hour) observe the daily routines of Communist countrymen. But Makavejev, trained in documentary, includes the social environment, aware of the ideas and ambitions people share: How bosses manage workers, men regard women and parents treat children. He has a sense of the contradictions in behavior—the way people use each other for sex, money and personal satisfaction. These endeavors are part of the life and landscape shown (magnificently backgrounded in Man is Not a Bird); all of it reflecting but not saluting the social structures of Communism.

In Goats, democracy is taken for granted. There’s no sense of individuals searching for pleasure and satisfaction, just mockery—Heslov’s basic we/them antagonism. It’s MSNBC-style comedy; more of the snideness that has degraded political discourse in the years since mainstream media fought against the Bush administration. It comes from romanticizing 1960s counterculture attitude when rock stars challenged the Establishment. Now that pop stars have become the Establishment, media minions like Clooney pretend their simplistic political notions help liberate the republic. But the irksome fact is, Goats merely activates the consumerist reflex to laugh with any nonsense being sold (bungled warfare, office slapstick, ludicrous spy maneuvers). In short, Goats proves the death of political satire.

After 40 years, Makavejev’s films prove amazingly alert to the way that political systems effect citizens’ imaginations. In Man is Not a Bird, a worker honored for his service states, “A man’s task is to build, to the best of his ability, his own happiness and a future for all of us.” Without propaganda or irony, blame isn’t placed on institutions but wonderment is found in the complicated ways people behave. No comparable compassion is felt in Heslov and Clooney’s clowning—they lack Makavejev’s insight.

Too bad Makavejev’s films aren’t better known. They point the way out of today’s disingenuous media. Makvejev could have performed wonders on this same material through showing, with depth and heart, that credible human beings comprise the military and so are to be understood, not merely judged or ridiculed. His films combine documentary, comedy and romance to keep viewers alert to the machinations of ideology and human folly. Critic Constantin Parvulescu called Makavejev’s films “constellation[s] of ideas”—a good description for their free-ranging form and inquisitiveness. He’s one of cinema’s great unsung comic, sexual and political originals, yet his innovations have been defiled and coarsened by mockumentaries Borat and Bruno, which Left-elite critics praise as a way of securing their own hegemony.

Goats’ piddling conviction comes from the Clooney Club’s relentless attempt at imitating counterculture chic of the past—not Makavejev’s obscure genius but Hollywood narcissism. Goats’ absurdly self-destructive military stunts mimic The Manchurian Candidate and when Cassady tells Wilton, “You’re the mission, Bob. It’s your job to tell them what happened. Tell everybody what happened!” it alludes to Three Days of the Condor.

Clooney’s matinee-idol goofiness in the Coen Brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou?, Intolerable Cruelty and Burn After Reading is all that keeps him from being declared an enemy of cinema. He’s a bad luck charm in the avaricious Oceans franchise and Left to his own devices, Clooney has forsaken entertainment to be poster boy for left-wing sarcasm and pseudo-social consciousness. This distrust-the-military, hippie sentimentality is tedious, merely an unlyrical spoof of the military made by people who still have never served their country.

Based on rough video records of Jackson’s rehearsal process prior to his planned comeback and world tour, This Is It captures Jackson at peak inventiveness. His genius is brought closer and clarified. Behind the tabloid image, he’s seen thinking, devising, improvising—and performing masterfully.
At age 50, Jackson was still a prodigy; possessed of protean talent and when in the company of collaborators (“These dancers are an extension of Michael,” says director Kenny Ortega) he is inspired.

Several of the rehearsal numbers—especially a nearly acapella “Billie Jean” and a stirring new arrangement of “The Way You Make Me Feel”—immediately rank with the greatest musical performances ever seen on the big screen. That’s the opportunity lost by such pop-attuned directors as Scorsese, Stone and, especially, Spielberg—who betrayed Jackson by cutting off ties following the witchhunt and erroneous accusations of bigotry that met the 1995 release of “They Don’t Care About Us.” Spielberg’s failure to engage Jackson on a movie-musical project (Peter Pan or Earth Song or Childhood) deprived the world of a possible Minnelli-level masterpiece.

Ortega’s collage work on This Is It shows the same care for dance and spectacle that distinguished his original High School Musical from its poor sequels. He blends behind-the-scenes details with prospective stage concepts so that Jackson’s showbiz vision remains a tantalizing probability. Both marvelous entertainment and post-modern deconstruction, its art value is as high as Jonathan Demme’s Talking Heads film Stop Making Sense. Ortega integrates addition footage commissioned for the world tour—mini music videos that recall Jackson’s great achievements in that field.

The what-if aspect of This Is It has a poignant element. It recalls the posthumous ballet sequence of The Red Shoes (1948) where empty ballet slippers trace a late artist’s well-rehearsed steps. Yet, This Is It is too vital to be elegiac. We’re watching a virtuoso in the midst of creativity. This is pop, after all; plus a dazzlingly accomplished run-through of some of the greatest music of our lifetime—whether the scorching “Black or White” (a song many Americans still can’t face that occasions Jackson’s gracious encouragement of a shy white blond female guitarist) or the

magnificent “Jam”—the most powerful rock song ever to masquerade as funk.

Jackson’s concert version of Smooth Criminal features a new movie-intro where he is inserted into Hollywood mythos, interacting with Rita Hayworth in Gilda as well as Bogart, Robinson, Gloria Grahame and a panoply of movie land immortals. This flamboyant sequence asserts Jackson’s physical oddity yet it proves Jackson’s fame equaled theirs and surpassed their talent. Just as Richard Pryor had to make his own concert movie to show the rich artistry Hollywood ignored, this Smooth Criminal clip glimpses the new Astaire and Kelly Hollywood should have embraced.

Look at Jackson’s “I Can’t Stop Loving You” improvisation: music goes through his body, inspiring physical poetry-pointing, picking notes out of the air like berries on a bush. He’s some kind of pop mandarin whose art (performed at the crossroads of genius and injustice) is just beginning to be understood. This, indeed, is it.

Armond White’s new book, Keep Moving: The Michael Jackson Chronicles is available at resistanceworkswdc@yahoo.com