It's a well-established axiom that theater critics have hearts that are three sizes too small. How else could we skewer productions that folks in the audience - including the 5-year-old sitting on my lap - wholeheartedly enjoy?
Such is the quandary facing this reviewer of the first national tour of D r. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which launched Thursday at the Hippodrome Theatre.
Aspects of this holiday production that faithfully re-create the beloved children's book and television program - the scenery, costumes and special effects - as well as Stefan Karl's performance as the Grinch, are superb. But, the plot is as stuffed with fillers as the Christmas roast beast.
There's a real argument to be made (and Jack O'Brien, who conceived of this production, has made it), that the Grinch is America's classic holiday story. The book succeeds in part because Theodor Geisel was wrestling with a genuine dilemma when he wrote it.
I've always suspected that the Grinch is based on the author himself. The character's complaints about the holiday - Too much noise! Too much commotion! Too much fuss, and too much stuff! - are the complaints of the cranky middle-aged. The clincher: in the story, the green furball mutters to himself, "Why, for fifty-three years I've put up with it now!"
The good Doctor was born in 1904, and the book was published in 1957.
In the decade after Miracle on 34th Street (1947) and It's a Wonderful Life (1946), it must have seemed positively unpatriotic to wish in print that Christmas might just go away. But, then came Geisel's little fable. Other grown-ups came out of the closet and confessed to the same, dark secret, and the Grinch became firmly entrenched in popular culture.
This production is at its best when it hews as closely as possible to the original storyline. John Lee Beatty's set and Robert Morgan's costumes - both of which reproduce Geisel's original pen-and-ink drawings - are marvels of ingenuity.
For instance, instead of fingers, the Grinch has excruciatingly long and pointed talons, which from time to time, appear from behind the red curtain, to enjoyably scary effect.
The scene in which the mutt Max, antlers tied onto his head, pulls the Grinch's sleigh down Mount Crumpet is a delightful mixture of high and low-tech theater tricks; actors holding large, cut-out "trees" run past the tableau, creating the illusion that it is the sleigh, and not they, who are moving.
