It’s a well-known irony that many classic Christmas songs were written by Jewish songwriters. A stage show, “OY! to the World — Christmas with a Twist!” celebrates this fact in all the right ways. With Hanukkah and Christmas overlapping this year, the 90-minute musical comedy returns to the Monroe Forum at North Hollywood’s El Portal Theatre through December 22. Set in a lodge in the Catskills Mountains in New York, the show follows Shelly Abrams, a Jewish man determined to revive his grandparents’ club with a holiday spectacular.
“The holidays can be anything you want them to be,” Jay Winnick, who stars as Shelly, told the Journal. “The characters say ‘wait a second, it’s CHRIST-mas, it’s not Christmas!’ and then realize that these were all developed and written by Jews … it’s all about discussing and hitting on the cultural feeling, and the overall question of what are the holidays and what do holidays mean to you?”
The show features “The Christmas Song,” “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and dozens more. The show’s writers, Maurice Godin and Gregory Thirloway, wanted to tap into the “shared cultural experience” of the winter holidays.
“This is a show that honors traditions around Christmas, Hanukkah, and other holiday gatherings,” Godin told The Journal. “It shows how very different family members can gather over the holidays and fit together.” Godin said that when he and Thirloway started writing “OY! To the World,” they talked about the question of whether Christmas had been merely appropriated by the Jewish songwriters.
“We try to separate and figure out now if we’re using an idea, are we appropriating it or are we being inspired by it?” Godin said. “This show is Greg’s brainchild, and we developed it together. One of the reasons why we made the cast so diverse is to show that everybody has their own way of celebrating humanity and love for humanity in different ways. It’s neither either or. It’s all inclusive of this idea that we all can come together in understanding how to celebrate it.”
Winnick pointed out even more ironic backstories of the songs, such as how Mel Tormé and Robert Wells wrote “The Christmas Song (‘Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire’)” during a muggy New York summer. And then there’s “O Holy Night” which was penned by the atheist poet Placide Cappeau in France in the 19th century. The song would catch flack for nearly a hundred years, as composer Adolphe Adam was falsely identified and scorned for being a Jew.
“When the Catholic Church found out who wrote it, they rejected it, saying ‘it lacked musical taste,’ Winnick said. “Forget the lyrics — the melody alone is gorgeous!”
Producer Heather Lee, said that as a non-Jew she is amused by the many uses of Yiddish words and phrases in the show, including “bashert” and a definition of what it really means “to be a mensch.”
“We use ‘mensch’ at the end, and that’s a hard concept sometimes to explain,” Winnick said. “There’s not really a translation of what a mensch is because it’s just such a powerful word.”
The show also includes veteran Broadway actress Sarah Uriarte Berry, along with television and stage actors Maya Sofia Enciso and Cameron J. Armstrong, with musical arrangements by Gerald Sternbach and choreography by Jeffrey Polk.
Audiences returning after seeing last year’s inaugural production will find plenty of new surprises. Eight new songs have been added and some of the characters have been reimagined. Lee calls it, “OY! to the World 2.0.”
It’s a show that will have everyone in the audience, regardless of religion, thinking about what their favorite Christmas songs are. While growing up in Canada, Godin said his mother loved to sing “O Holy Night” in French and that he “loved watching her love it.” Winnick says that his favorite is “The Christmas Song” because “it hits on a lot of levels” and he feels fortunate that he gets to sing it in the show.
“Audiences will have new favorites after they come to see the show,” Godin said. “There are a few that I didn’t know that we put into the show, and they’ve become real hits for the show, I’m quite surprised!”
“OY! to the World ~ Christmas with a Twist!” runs through December 22 at the El Portal Theatre’s Monroe Forum in North Hollywood. Tickets are available at www.ElPortalTheatre.com.
Thursday, Friday, Saturday
7:00 p.m.; Saturday matinee at 3:00; Sunday at 1:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m.
