Klingons, Golden Girls, and sad Santas: The 2009 holiday theater roundup

Maybe you're among those who approach the holidays with deep reverence for tradition and a heart that gladdens whenever you hear "Jingle Bells" piping out of the ceiling speakers at Target. Maybe you're ready to poke a little fun at Santa and deflate some of the preciousness of the season. Or maybe you're a barbarian space alien armed with a ray gun and a wicked-looking blade. These theaters are ready for you.  

A Christmas Carol
Guthrie Theater, through Dec. 31, $29-$70
The Guthrie’s A Christmas Carol is back for a 35th year, so the time has come for many to make their annual theater pilgrimage. This year’s stage event has been slimmed down to 90 minutes with no intermission, speeding up the whole proceeding while remaining a high-energy, visually lavish affair heavy on crowd-pleasing slapstick. Long-time Scrooge Raye Birk earned himself a reprieve after an excellent turn in Faith Healer this fall; he is replaced by stage and TV actor Peter Michael Goetz. The supporting cast includes heavy-hitters Steven Epp, Richard Ooms (the regular Scrooge some years back), and Emily Gunyou Halaas, so plenty of bang for your buck there.

A Klingon Christmas Carol
Mixed Blood Theater, through Dec. 13, $18
There is no direct translation of “God bless us, everyone” into Klingon because, let’s face it, the highly disciplined Star Trek warrior race is far more likely to proclaim, “Today is a good day to die!” ("Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam!") The lack of niceties and celebratory words hasn’t stopped Commedia Beauregard from re-mounting this geeked-out take on the Dickens tale, which is (perhaps surprisingly) fairly true to the original storyline, casting Scrooge as a coward in need of toughening up through the visits of the ghosts. Even if you don't understand them, watching actors perform a play in a Klingon is a mesmerizing experience (supertitles will benefit the non-native speakers in the audience) and the stage combat with authentic Klingon weaponry might help work out some holiday tension.

Fat Man Crying
Minneapolis Theater Garage, Dec. 4-20, $17-$20
Joseph Scrimshaw is something of a Cirque Du Soleil of local comedy, setting up and syndicating successful and funny shows that take on a running life of their own. The author of interactive hits like Adventures In Mating and The Tragedy Of You brings back the Christmas tale Fat Man Crying for a third year. As the name implies, the show centers around a not-so-jolly Santa crashing a perfectly happy couple’s Christmas while hitting the bottle, revealing too much, and embodying everything maudlin and hilarious about the holiday. Original Santa Tim Uren has left to do his own Christmas show (titled Tantalos, after the figure in Greek mythology whose punishment in the afterlife was never getting his desire), but replacement Matt Erkel is game for the task.

A Christmas Carol: The Golden Girls Remix
Bryant-Lake Bowl, through Dec. 20, $10/$12
If you were more interested in MTV than The Golden Girls in the '80s, or your current TV-watching habits don’t include the Lifetime network, do yourself a favor and get to know Blanche, Dorothy, Rose, and Sophia. Those old broads were funny, like your grandmother around the holidays when she’s had one or two drinks and starts telling dirty jokes. This culture-meets-kitsch mashup isn’t the first foray into Golden Girls territory for director Matthew Foster; several years ago he re-wrote Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya to include the gray-haired quartet. In the Dickens remix, three classic episodes will get wrapped up in sweet nostalgia, ribaldry, and lots of cheesecake.

S. Gunter Klaus And The Story Before
Southern Theater, Dec. 10-23, $22
Prolific theater-maker Jon Ferguson has a long and successful track record working with children’s shows; his Fringe Festival show Projectile Thinking with the Stages Theatre Company sold out, and he just closed an original work, Gregory Gregorson And The Magic Pinto Bean, at the Children’s Theater to positive reviews. For S. Gunter Klaus, Ferguson collaborated with playwright John Heimbuch and an ensemble of actors of all ages to tell the origin story of Santa, which, according to Ferguson, “is not your Christian Christmas story.” The company went back to older, pagan myths for this new winter’s tale, so expect no Coca-Cola Claus, but something darker, more inventive and with a far more primal spark.

Brett Favre’s Christmas Spectacular: The Immaculate Interception
Brave New Workshop, through Jan 30, $24-$27
The gang at Brave New Workshop know how to throw a Christmas party without getting too weepy or resorting to tacky holiday sweaters to get a giggle. The venerable sketch-comedy institution has made its own tradition of topical holiday shows with outrageous titles (past shows include Stuck In The Manger With You; Carol On My Wayward Son and All I Want For Christmas Is 700 Billion Dollars), which are always fresh and often hilarious. For those of you uninterested in football, don’t worry; the show is only nominally about The Great Minnesotan Hope, and you'll be too busy laughing and trying to keep up with the snappy pace to care.

The Nutcracker (Not So) Suite
Ritz Theater, Dec. 9-31, $22-$27
The other stage classic of the season is The Nutcracker, most often “enjoyed” by parents of small children at dance recitals. The Twin Cities have a number of high-quality versions, including the long-running institution Loyce Houlton’s Nutcracker Fantasy from the Minnesota Dance Theater and the visiting Great Russian Nutcracker by the Moscow Ballet. For our money though, the Ballet of the Doll’s punny but apt (Not So) Suite take on the whole affair is the place to be for some great dance as well as adult entertainment. Starring live Barbie and Ken dolls, set in New York sometime in the late '60s, and often involving drum-and-bass remixes of Tchaikovsky, this show never stops tinkering with tradition, so be prepared for anything from the sugarplum fairies.

BeaverDANCE!
Bedlam Theater, Dec. 3-19, $12.65-$31.17
There is no way to describe Bedlam’s holiday show without sounding ridiculous and absurd, but really, that’s what you should come to expect from the company. In a nutshell, BeaverDANCE! is a musical dinner show about fur trappers in Central Minnesota meeting an Indian princess named Bemidji who can speak to beavers, with a cameo by Karl Marx as Santa Claus. To top it all off, the show is directed by burlesque queen Foxy Tann, and it should be fairly self-evident that if you get a burlesque actress to helm a show called Beaverdance!, you are in for a good time.