Tired of Charles Dickens’s “Christmas Carol?” How about a singing/dancing Elf up in Central Park? Those folks who loved Will Farrell in the movie treatment of “Elf” may think James Moye is, perhaps, trying too hard to re-Farrellize in the current, colorful Paper Mill Playhouse revival. Fortunately, Moye’s energetic, even manic, overgrown Elf—called Buddy—is just what is needed to make this manufactured Santa Story come to life.
Oddly enough, Buddy’s real Dad—Buddy got to the North Pole by mistake and was raised by Santa’s Elves—is in real trouble because he cannot come up with a dynamite idea for a nifty new Christmas-for-kiddies best seller at the major publishing house where he is a desperate editor among corporate idiots. That must have been very much on the minds of the book writers for Elf themselves: How about Buddy and Santa’s grounded sleigh up in Central Park?
This works very well, especially thanks to the design ingenuity of Matthew Smucker (sets), David C. Woolard (costumes), and Charlie Morrison (lighting).
Up In Central Park was once a successful Broadway musical, but Elf seems to have been inspired, instead, by “Miracle on 34th-Street,” which is where both the actual and fictional MACY*S is located. The book for Elf has been a bit updated, but you really don’t have to have influence to get a table at Tavern on the Green anymore. (In its new incarnation, it can seat scores of Central Parkers.)
Buddy’s foster father, Santa, is both cuddly & jolly in Paul C. Vogt’s Saturday Evening Post impersonation, abetted by Madge Dietrich’s Mrs. Claus. But Robert Cucciioli—remember him in Jekyll & Hyde?—plays a very stern actual father, a bit appalled to realize that a college infatuation has resulted in an outsized Elf. He has also not been much of a dad or a husband to his own immediate family. So this modern-day Scrooge of the emotions will have to undergo a Christmas-fueled transformation!
Since PETA has Nixed Santa’s reindeer, Buddy and his dad have to get everyone on stage—as well as the snow-covered audience—to get that sleigh back up in the polluted Manhattan air. (Said snow-covered audience—fake-foam snow!—enjoyed Elf hugely and noisily. So did I! You just have to believe very hard in the legend of Christmas and Santa Claus.
