A Christmas Story: The Musical is a story driven by a particularly festive MacGuffin. Set in the fuzzily defined “1940s,” the low-stakes plot is built around nine-year-old Ralphie Parker’s mission to receive a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas.
This small story provides room for expounding on family, love and “the good old days.” There are a number of folksy subplots built around the experience of growing up in suburban Michigan — encounters with a local bully, battles with furnaces and the recurring spectre of the Midwestern cold.
Meanwhile, Ralphie’s father is fixated with a toy of his own — a novelty leg lamp that’s his reward for winning a mail-in crossword puzzle competition. The salacious light fixture earns a musical number of its own (A Major Award) as well as provokes recurring suburban hi-jinx and low-level marital discord.
The musical is based on the 1983 movie, A Christmas Story, which is itself based on a series of short stories published in the early 1960s by Jean Shepard. En route to the Arts Club Theatre Company, this story has been filtered through several layers of nostalgia, resulting in more than a few elements that feel oddly anachronistic.
Chief among them is the fact that this is fundamentally a story about a nine-year-old’s wish for a gun. The adult characters aren’t completely neglectful: whenever Ralphie brings up the BB gun, he’s consistently met with the same, bleak reprobation, “You’ll shoot your eye out.”
Still, the idea that any kid might get a gun for Christmas — no matter how low the firepower — now seems outright unbelievable. Hopefully, no younger members of the audience got any ideas from the show or they’re likely to be disappointed with their own Christmas mornings.
Another peculiar anachronism is Ralphie’s mother, played by UBC alumna Meghan Gardiner. Gardiner first rose to prominence with Dissolve, a one-woman show about date rape. Her most recent project, Love Bomb, deals with predatory relationships and human trafficking. It’s a little jarring to see her in such an insubstantial role, singing her heart out about scrubbing floors and wheedling her kids into eating their dinner (A Mother Does). She does a fine job, but the ode to housewifery sounds especially strange coming from her.
The musical’s greatest strength lies in its musical numbers which are choreographed by director Valerie Easton. The best of these is Ralphie to the Rescue, a Wild West-themed, tap-dancing hullabaloo in which Ralphie uses his brand-new BB Gun to save his classmates from a pack of mustache-twirling bandits. This number owes a lot to the cowboy movies of the early 20th century, but the sense of a childish daydream — writ large and brought to life onstage — is timeless.
By the end of the show, both leg lamps and BB guns have been dealt with. Without spoiling what happens to either, the audience is left to ultimately conclude that these objects are less important than love, family and togetherness. Perhaps the reason that A Christmas Story has been adapted so many times is that every generation needs a gentle reminder of these lessons. Although there’s a sense of cliché in this theme, it’s a worthwhile one to remember – at least every 20 years or so.