The story begins with Santa recounting this Christmas
tale from his home in the North Pole. It is the story of Buddy a young orphan boy who one Christmas Eve climbs into Santa’s sack and is mistakenly taken back to
the North Pole. There he is brought up by elves and believes himself to be one
of them despite his enormous stature compared to them. He’s not the brightest
of “elves” and his size slows him down, he thinks he just isn’t very good at
things until he overhears some elves talking and asks Santa if it's true that he
really is a human and where does he really
come from?
So begins his
journey to New York to find his father. On arrival he finds his father who is
on Santa’s 'naughty list' and his half-brother who no longer believes in Santa,
Buddy is determined to help them remember the true meaning of Christmas .
Unfortunately at first his father who is now a children’s book publisher
doesn’t want to believe Buddy is his son and has his thrown out of the offices. Left to make his own way Buddy finds himself
a job at Macey’s helping Santa, he gets excited about this until he meets him and
there is much hilarity that follows when Buddy sees he isn’t the real Santa.
In the show Buddy is played by Tam Ryan and his
comical timing and jokes continually have the audience in stitches. There is much
hilarity over his naive confusion of
things and elements of the show have real slapstick humour
The scenery and props for this were cleverly done, the North Pole looked like a magical wonderland complete with a reindeer moving
around the stage whilst Buddy chased after it.
The projected screen at the back of the stage gave each scene greater depth
adding to the atmosphere, there were lots
of great songs as you would expect to narrate the story and super choreography for
the dance scenes which also included some amazing displays of aerial dance by
one particular artiste which left you in awe, holding your breath whilst you
watched her spin on ropes and fabrics and unravel to the ground.
During one scene change there was much hilarity as
Buddy, being chased away by the police came down to the audience and began shoveling
in large amounts of popcorn from someone’s bucket, followed by someone else’s
drink. There was lots of pantomime banter and the odd joke that adults would
find amusing. A date scene at Central Park allowed two of the dancers to
showcase a stunning gravity-defying performance on roller-skates, I’m sure I
wasn’t the only one holding my breath.
The truly magical part where Santa is seen flying in
his sleigh above the stage left you feeling a real sense of make-believe.
Audience participation was good with lots of clapping to songs and young and
old were in hysterics over the slapstick humour: who'd have thought a person
dressed as an asparagus could cause such hilarity...?!
This really was a feel-good, fun show and generally kept in
line with the film with the addition of the magical touches of live theatre. Thoroughly
enjoyable and despite being shown earlier than usual in the year, left you feeling very much in the
Christmas spirit!
Reviewer - Catherine Gall
on - 21.10.21
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