Review: Christmas Belles by multiple (Sam Bass, Wimberley Players, City Theatre)
by Michael Meigs

The goofy holiday comedy Christmas Belles has closed at the Sam Bass Theatre in Round Rock and at the Wimberly Players, but you can still catch it through this weekend at the City Theatre in Austin, one of my favorite venues in town. 

Three local versions? Four, in fact, if you’re willing to extend your area of coverage to San Antonio, where the show closed this past weekend at the Harlequin Dinner Theatre. 

I reviewed the Sam Bass Community Theatre version on November 27 and the following week I took my spouse out to see the Wimberly Players’ version, staged in their tidy, impeccably finished small theatre. She enjoyed the country drive but she turned to me after the show, “Are you REALLY going to see this show three times??”

I did exactly that, catching the City Theatre version last week. Christmas Belles is fun, a broad-brush sitcom-type presentation of small town eccentrics, their quarrels and their preoccupations. The focus is the annual Christmas pageant, set up with a new director for the first time in 27 years and plagued by accidents, incidents, and the rivalry with the cantata staged the same evening at the First Baptist Church.

The story was put together by a trio of writers who retired to the mountains in Asheville, North Carolina, after making their careers and money in television, in Los Angeles and New York.  The “belles” are the three Futrelle sisters, subjects of a trilogy of plays.

This play is the second of the series. Sister Frankie is unexpectedly pregnant in middle age, and sister Twink is in the clink because she torched her ex-beau’s NASCAR memorabilia in revenge for his unfaithfulness. Sister Honey Raye, recently returned to town and trying to live down a scandalous reputation, seeks to redeem herself in the eyes of the townsfolk by directing the pageant at the Tabernacle of the Lamb. 

The various other characters are equally stereotypical. I initially compared this style of writing to Al Capp’s Li’l Abner or to the Beverly Hillbillies television series. It occurred to me while studying the Sunday funnies this week that Snuffy Smith is another representative of the genre.

My wife can’t understand why Texans or Southerners would put up with this type of comedy. Mind you, she does not have a strong regional identification, coming from a military family and then having served abroad with me for decades. The discipline there was to seek to understand host country cultures and never, never to make fun of them. 

The three authors of the Futrelle trilogy insist that they themselves are southerners – so if they can entertain people across the United States with lampoons of small-town preoccupations, I’m happy to laugh right along with them. I lived in Alabama and Tennessee until I graduated from university. Although my aim from a tender age was to get out to the greater world – which I did, for a long time -- I’m comfortable with the silly stereotypes of regional and rural life. In fact, at Wimberly, the pre-show and intermission conversations of the three middle-aged women sitting behind us in the theatre were almost as entertaining as the show itself.

Christmas Belles doesn’t get better with successive viewings at different companies, but it does reveal itself. This is a pretty slick contraption, a Rube Goldberg sort of machine to deliver laughs.

The audience is first introduced to Frankie, the down-to-earth matron who is just about nine months pregnant, with twins, and to her husband Dub – who mirrors her, given the affliction of his kidney stones and his worry about providing for the new arrivals. Frankie anchored each of these productions. Frankie also serves as a chorus, addressing herself to her departed Mama both in Act I and Act II.

Renée Brown at Sam Bass Community Theatre was my favorite, perhaps because she was the first Frankie I saw. Whitney Marlett Mollahan (center) at Wimberly was just as good. As City Theatre’s Frankie, Rosemary Holly might have been a trifle too young for a woman who would “have twin 15-year-old boys at the age of 60,” but her tolerance and patience with her fruitcake sisters kept her calmly at the center of the goings on.

I had similar notions about Frankie’s husband, Dub – the actors in Round Rock and in Wimberly were very different, but they rang true, especially in those smaller town settings. Again, City Theatre’s guest director Daniel Lefave was working with a younger cast and crafting a more antic story. 



In Round Rock Randall McKee had both the right age and the heft for Dub, and he gave us both the pain of that kidney stone and his spartan disposition in confronting it; in Wimberly, Gary Yowell was attentive and long-suffering. City Theatre’s Daniel Sawtelle played Dub’s pain with an exquisite mime and visual lead-in, lips pursed and eyes bugging, teasing the audience as we waited for that amazing feeling finally to reach his vocal chords. This was Loony-Tunes pain, the sort you get when Elmer Fudd hits his thumb with a hammer. Very funny, and consistent with the overall style of the production, which presented a cartoon world for us.

If you were frivolous enough, you could call this play “The Three Sisters, ” as shown here in Round Rock (top), Wimberly (center) and Austin (bottom). 

Those relations played smoothly in each production – Twink the felon in the county jail jumpsuit was Jan Phillips in Round Rock, Amber Lackey in Wimberly, and Jen Coy in Austin. The very much not-pregnant Honey Raye was Christian Little-Manley in Round Rock, Juli Dearrington in Wimberly, and Terri Bennett in Austin. 

The role of Deputy Sheriff John Curtis Buntner showed wide variation in casting and delivery. Buntner is the dutiful, self-important lawman who guards felon Twink, arranges for her work release to support the pageant, and eventually gets suckered into portraying Elvis.


In Round Rock Gene Storie was tall and twinkle-eyed; in Wimberly Perry Redden was of average height but had those cowboy-actor good looks, and when the time came, he hip-swiveled and sang in a fine imitation of the King. Austin’s Michael Schnick gave us the Barney Fife version – wiry, jumpy, and pistol-packing (one wonders whether the Sheriff, like Andy Griffith, had entrusted him with any bullets). And Schnick in his flapping, tinseled, red-orange Elvis suit was a sight to behold.

The differences between productions were most evident in the role of Raynerd Chissum, the town simpleton. Frankie Futrelle may be the anchor, but simpleton Raynerd is, all by himself, both the fool and the Wise Man. He walks around trailing a little red wagon everywhere he goes; in most of his dialogue he proclaims, “I just love Christmas!” He reports the disasters of the pageant rehearsals and performance – and when wicked, inebriated Patsy Price makes a fool of herself, Raynerd finds himself on stage and tells us the Christmas story in the words of St. Luke. 

 

Steve Menke in Round Rock (not pictured) played Raynerd with a scruffy fur hat with ear flaps and a gleam of constant amusement. Wimberly’s Marvin Carson (left) gave us a simpler Raynerd – a man straightforward, non-emotive, factual, and interested in his Christmas chow, someone living non-judgmentally and entirely in the present moment. When Carson sat down on stage and told the Christmas story, he delivered that miracle with utter simplicity and conviction. He had great dignity. At the City Theatre in Austin, Shane Sawtelle’s Raynerd was loud and exuberant, a man with a hug for everyone he knew – again, a simpleton played broadly, sympathetically, but principally for laughs. 

So there you are – three successful productions, shaped by director and cast for specific audiences, very similar and yet in some ways very different. The simplicity in Round Rock captured me. Wimberly’s production was a bit more staged, with a fairly lengthy caroling session at the end, and I would bet that most of the folks in the audience knew most of the folks on stage. The City Theatre in Austin was playing the play, especially since relatively few in the audience would know the individuals acting out, up there on stage.

Now, if Christmas Belles can give that much variation, it's no wonder that we keep going back to see what directors and casts have done with the classics. Theatre can always amaze us.

 

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Christmas Belles
by Jones, Hope and Wooten
multiple (Sam Bass, Wimberley Players, City Theatre)

2008 productions at Sam Bass Community Theatre, Wimberley Players, City Theatre