Watching “Christmas With Elvis” on Monday night at the Chopin Theatre, two competing thoughts entered my head. And, no, “Don’t be Cruel” was not one of them.
Actually, one was fascination at how transformative a really great Chicago actress like Brenda Barrie can be in an otherwise fair-to-middling show. To say that Barrie throws herself into the role of a sad-sack single woman, ready to pop pills and drink her way through a lonely Christmas Eve, does not even remotely describe the intensity of her work here. Barrie apparently has decided she is doing Eugene O’Neill and she proceeds accordingly. She’s very funny, too.
My second thought, or rather feeling, was a great wash of nostalgia for the fearless off-Loop theater of the early 1990s, especially the wacky, politically incorrect but invariably amusing homegrown holiday entertainments that typified the era. This show put be back in mind of “Hellcab,” the smash-hit Will Kern play that I used to enjoy seeing every year and that made glorious comic play of the lot of the ordinary, working-class Chicagoans, invariably freezing half to death.
During that era, I was particularly fond of a venue called the Halsted Theatre Center (located at 2700 N. Halsted on that great theatrical thoroughfare), home of some truly memorable and outré commercial productions, not the least of which was “Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love,” by a Canadian writer named Brad Fraser, of whom I was especially fond.
The Halsted Theatre Center, along with the back of the Beat Kitchen, represent the origin story of “Christmas With Elvis,” which is bizarrely back in business at the Chopin Theatre in Wicker Park after a 32 year interregnum and, one might reasonably say, a recession in the seeming commercial viability of a show wherein the roles of Jacob Marley and the ghosts of Christmases past, present and future are basically all filled by Elvis.
As now amusingly played by Victor Holstein, the King returns from the dead to offer the show’s heroine company, music, seduction, spiritual guidance, therapy and even a whiz-bang sexual favor with just a touch of dead-celebrity remove. And Barrie acts out all this nonsense like it’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”
Aptly enough, the remount of “Christmas With Elvis,” as quite lavishly produced by the playwright, Terry Spencer Hesser, and friends, is directed by Dexter Bullard, an important figure in 1990s off-Loop theater. I don’t know the entire back story here, but I gather Hesser (who went on to a highly successful career as an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker) had long dreamed of working with Bullard and I think she basically just decided, what the heck, I can afford to hire him now and give this lovable crazy show another outing, replete with a very cool Milwaukee Avenue setting created by Eleanor Kahn.
Nobody would write this thing now, frankly, given its premise of Elvis — yes Elvis — as a potential cure for bulimia, alcoholism and depression. That said, if you can get past that and see it for what it was, and is, this truly is an enjoyably campy throwback to a vanished era of Chicago theater, when single, professional urbanites who were a bit lonely in the city could find gutsy entertainment to match up with their seasonal needs.
At one point, the young woman worries that her dalliance with Elvis might verge on necrophilia.
“I don’t speak French,” Elvis replies.
Not funny? Then you don’t want Christmas with this Elvis, anyway. But if you’re cracking a smile …
Theater Loop
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Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Review: “Christmas With Elvis” (3 stars)
When: Through Jan. 7
Where: Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division St.
Running time: 2 hours
Tickets: $50-$75 at www.chopintheatre.com