The Golden Girls sitcom is in perpetual rotation on television it seems. It's late at night and sometimes simultaneously on two channels as an alternative to the news. It presaged the now standard comedy format of four women bonded in a friendship that forms a chosen family. Think Living Single, Girlfriends, and Sex and the City but with four mature women living in Miami. Hell in A Handbag Productions is known for spoofing classic melodrama with most of the leading characters played in drag by the Handbag ensemble. The Golden Girls Save Christmas Lost Episode Parody has landed to fill your stocking with laughter and nostalgia.
Artistic director David Cerda is the mind behind the Hell in Handbag parodies. He wrote this with the same punch and sarcasm as the original show creator Susan Harris. The Golden Girls Save Christmas is directed by Frankie Leo Bennett who manages to keep the frenetic pace needed for a good parody. The show is full of sly one-liners from other shows that the television cast starred in. The cast is great at recreating Dorothy, Rose, Blanche, and Sophia with the mannerisms and timing of the television cast.
Picture it...Christmas Eve 1980-something. Our heroines Dorothy (David Cerda) and Rose (a brilliant Ed Jones) are stuck in Miami because of severe weather in Minnesota and New York. Sophia (Ryan Oates) has a couple of pals coming over to go troll the mall and get into some mischief. Blanche (Grant Drager) is entertaining a gentleman caller in the boudoir when tragedy strikes. The bedroom calisthenics are too much and Nick (Terry McCarthy) throws his back out. This is not the Christmas Eve that anyone had expected, and it is made even more hilarious by the people who dropped by.
Sophia has invited Nancy Drew (Danne W. Taylor) and Esther Shapiro ((Michael Rashid) over to have a few drinks and then start the shenanigans. Taylor is great as the rather curmudgeonly Nancy who isn't as famous as when she was a young sleuth. Rashid has some great lines as Esther with a giant Texas swoop bouffant and a sequined top. Hats off to the wig designer Keith Ryan who is a Hell in a Handbag ensemble member. It wouldn't be a disastrous evening without Dorothy's ex-husband Stan (Scott Sawa) dropping by looking for sympathy over his latest failure of edible Christmas ornaments.
Blanche is horrified to find out that Esther and Nancy know Nick intimately. Nick is of course Santa Claus who cannot fulfill his yearly duties. Just in time, Mrs. Claus (Robert Williams) shows up resplendent in white and a tailored suit. Mrs. Claus and Nick have an open marriage and have streamlined Christmas to where the North Pole is located in Miami. The two top elves, Happy (Eustace Allen and Kyle (Tyler Anthony Smith), zip in to get the sleigh assembled and the gifts wrapped.
Rose is flabbergasted that Christmas is not as she knew it back in St. Olaf. Jones has perfected Rose Nylund's guileless facial and body movements. Cerda is nearly a mirror image of Bea Arthur and tosses in a "God will get you for that" from Maude. Smith brings a similar edgy petulance to Kyle as he did as Christine in another Hell in a Handbag parody Murder Rewrote Kyle and Happy are elves at odds with Allen as the dour and bitter Happy.
Cerda, Drager, and Jones are more true to the television characters but Oates' Sophia is more like Ruth Buzzi from Laugh-In. All that was missing was the hairnet. Oates has good comic timing but a parody is supposed to exaggerate the quirks of a character. Some of the timing was a bit off with Cerda's lines as Dorothy. He was sublime as June Crayfish in Murder Rewrote. The costume, hair, and expressions are there but the snappy repartee lagged in a couple of scenes. The best exchanges were between Cerda and Jones as Dorothy and Rose. Dorothy's impatience with Rose's St. Olaf stories and weird stinky foods is spot on.
As in the television show, there was "a very special moment" subplot. It wasn't as great as when Rose was hooked on pills, or Rose thought that she died, or that Bob Hope was her father. Kelly Bolton plays Darlene from the temp agency called to supply extra elves. She also plays one of Darlene's children left at home alone to wait for Santa, and the police officer for a hilarious Chicago insider joke. The Darlene storyline was a bit of a drag on the pacing and they could have stuck to the police story and the kids' vignette when the girls drop off the presents.
If you were or are a fan of the show, you will enjoy all of the inside jokes and even more so the raunchy one-liners that could have been on the show had it been a premium cable show. The show's creator Susan Harris also wrote the groundbreaking comedy Soap which appealed to an LGBTQ audience with newcomer Billy Crystal as a gay man contemplating a sex-change operation. The Golden Girls had some groundbreaking storylines just by being a show about older women who were sexually active with LGBTQ characters. The Golden Girls Save Christmas is a wonderful tribute to that show and the artistry of the original cast who created indelible characters perfect for a parody.
The production crew deserves some spotlight for The Golden Girls Save Christmas. Costume designer Madeline Felauer made flawless reproductions of Dorothy's tunic style and Rose's bibbed dress. Blanche's negligee with the heart cutouts is something that Blanche would have alluded to on the show but it is fun to see one of her costumes that she would describe. Syd Genco is a makeup artist in the truest sense of the word. Taking characters and making them even more exaggerated is usually best done by an illustrator like Mort Drucker for Mad Magazine. Genco hits the mark on each character.
The Golden Girls Save Christmas- A Lost Episodes Parody is a world premiere from Hell in a Handbag. It is another fun holiday thing to take some friends or family to see. We all need some good laughs in these times. I recommend that you and some grownup friends check it out. It's an R-rated experience.
The Golden Girls Save Christmas- A Lost Episodes Parody is now playing through December 30 at the Hoover Leppen Theater at the Center on Halsted, 3656 N. Halsted St. Tickets are $42-$55 with special rates for groups of 10 or more. For more information, please visit www.handbagproductions.org or www.buytickets.athellinahandbagproductions/1024359.
For more information on this and other plays, see theatreinchicago.com.
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