Barney the Elf The Other Theatre Company’s tentative entry into Chicago’s already crowded field of campy, shlocky holiday shows suffers from fidgety staging, cluttered choreography, simplistic plotting, unnecessary musical numbers, and parody lyrics of pop and Broadway standards more workmanlike than clever. But Bryan Renaud’s alternately childlike and crude romp gets the most important element right: the unaccountable love affair between Barney, an incessantly cheery elf banished from the gay-unfriendly North Pole, and Zooey, a vain, cynical Chicago drag queen. As the unlikely couple Yando Lopez and Dixie Lynn Cartwright are ridiculous, open-hearted, trashy, and touching, finding enduring emotional truth amid the foolishness. If Renaud and company can bring the rest of the show up to their level, they may have a genuine holiday classic on their hands. —Justin Hayford
Christmas Dearest Hell in a Handbag artistic director David Cerda wrote and stars in this sublimely awful musical about Joan Crawford starring in a sublimely awful musical about the life of Jesus Christ (she’s the Blessed Virgin, natch). Forcing her cast to work on December 25, the diva earns visitations from two Christmas spirits—and Bette Davis—who attempt to revive her dormant humanity. Corrupting A Christmas Carol with vulgar, campy hysterics yields almost nonstop delights–and even bits of wisdom. —Justin Hayford
The Lion King In what should be the first act’s highest emotional peak, lion cub and heir apparent Simba gets caught amid stampeding wildebeests. When Simba’s father, King Mufasa, leaps to the rescue, the king ends up in the clutches of his unctuous, regicidal brother, Scar. Like most scenes in Julie Taymor’s 1997 Broadway blockbuster, this one’s dazzlingly staged, ingeniously designed, and emotionally empty (apparently no one even bothered to tell the kid playing Simba to act, you know, scared). Unlike Disney’s efficient 75-minute animated feature, Taymor’s semistatic two-and-a-half-hour pageant pays scant attention to the fundamentals of storytelling. All the inventive puppetry, glorious choral singing, and eye-popping scenery serves mostly to glorify itself. And does Patrick R. Brown really have to make villainous Scar so queeny? —Justin Hayford
A Q Brothers’ Christmas Carol In this, the year of Hamilton (now coming to Chicago), Lin-Manuel Miranda’s many new fans would do well to check out this holiday hit by the Q Brothers ensemble, a group of emcees that have been in the disparate-genre hip-hop-redux game since the late 90s. Four seasoned performers spit couplets and retell Charles Dickens’s inescapable ghost story as a modern urban parable. An anti-immigrant miser with a wig factory (can you guess which presidential candidate gets roasted?) gets haunted by rappers and singers past, present, and future, including a Rastafarian Marley. It’s an unabashedly silly and brilliantly efficient reminder that alt-Christmas shows can be just as heartwarming and family friendly as the classics; one visual trick in particular is sure to elicit a gasps from even the most curmudgeonly Scrooges. —Dan Jakes
