Dance! Why don't you dance? Photo from The Doctor in Spite of Himself at Yale Rep, taken by Carol Rosegg.

Interesting pre show phenomenon at performances of A Doctor in Spite of Himself, which closed last week at Yale rep. Rallied by some animated young ushers, audiences were urged to get up and shake their booties, dancing in the aisles and in their seats.

The activity put the crowd in an appropriate mood for the antic hyperkinetic comedy which followed. Yet it also existed on a separate plane, since the old pop songs playing pre- show had nothing in common with the three-man multi-instrumental live band which scored the play.

On opening night, for instance, the tune which roused the most folks to their feet was Harry Nilsson’s 1970s Jamaican novelty tune “Lime and the Coconut,” which other than its medical theme has little relation to either Moliere’s play or what Steven Epp and Christopher Bayes had done with it.

Art the same time, that “Fuck at, let’s dance” vibe was very similar to the “Fuck art, let’s laugh” vibe of the subsequent show. And even Moliere purists (if there is such an animal) would have to admit that there’s a direct link to this sort of subscriber-audience opening-night hullabaloo and the pageantry and partying which preceded royal theater engagements in Moliere’s time.

Saw the new Alvin & The Chipmunks movie, Chipwrecked with my daughters yesterday. We’d already read the novelization, so we were prepared. Except the novelization doesn’t include any incidents of singing, dancing or sight gags, so it’s rather more existential about the whole trapped-on-a-desert-island thing.

You’d think there’d be little of interest in Chipwrecked for fans of live stage entertainmen (i.e. NHTJ readers) since the stars are animated chipmunks and most of the action takes place on boats and a desert island.

Yet of the three key human actors in the film, two are inspired stand-up comedy experimenters.

David Cross returns to the series as nasty music industry agent Ian Hawke. He’s clad  for the entirety of the film in a pelican costume. When Jason Lee (as David Seville, the chipmunks’ protector) asks Ian why he won’t take off the outfit, Cross says he’s not wearing anything otherwise. Those who know Cross as the “Never Nude” Tobias Funke on Arrested Development” can appreciate the acting range evident here.

This is likely Cross’ last Chipmunk experience, judging from this story on IndieWire.

The other key real-live comic presence in Chipwrecked is Jenny Slate, who lasted one season on Saturday Night Live (2009-10; she’s the one who said “fucking” instead of the scripted “freaking” on-air during her very first episode) and created Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (now a bestselling book as well as a web series). Slate is also the co-creator and co-host (with Gabe Liedman and Max Silvestri) of Big Terrific, the live Brooklyn-based variety event which Time Out magazine deemed “Best Stand-Up” in its Best of New York honors for 2010.

Finally, I know you’re wondering if the Glenn Berger credited with co-writing Chipwrecked is the same guy who wrote the longrunning Wandering Jew musing Underneath the Lintel and the Spider-Man musical. It’s not. The Lintel/Spidey writer is Glen Berger with one “n.” The two-“n” Glenn Berger—credited for Chipwrecked alongside his usual writing partner Jonathan Aibel—is known for the Kung Fu Panda films. Both Bergers have written for TV cartoons: Glenn for King of the Hill and Glen for the PBS series Arthur.

Glenn Berger and Jonathan Aibel co-wrote the previous Alvin and the Chipmunks film, The Squeakquel, as well. Will Robb and Chris Viscardi wrote the first of the current series of Alvin and the Chipmunks movies in 2007, and I miss their human touch—these are the guys who created the sensitive yet absurd children’s series The Adventures of Pete & Pete for Nickelodeon in the early 1990s. My girls and I read the novelization of the second Alvin movie too, and Robb & Viscardi are given some sort of acknowledgement in that, though they did not get a screenplay credit in the film.

Well, I can check the Chipmunks off the holiday must-see list. On to Tintin!

One of the lighter moments from It's A Wonderful Life—A Live Radio Play at the Long Wharf Theatre through Dec. 31. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

It’s a Wonderful Life—A Live Radio Play

Through Dec. 31 at the Long Wharf Theatre, 222 Sargent Dr., New Haven. (203) 787-4282, longwharf.org.

By Joe Landry. Directed by Eric Ting. Set Design: Mikiko Macadams. Costume Design: Jessica Ford. Lighting Design: Stephen Strawbridge. Sound Design: John Gromada. Stage Manager: Lori Lundquist. Performed by Alex Moggridge (George Bailey), Dan Domingues (Mr. Potter and others), Kevyn Morrow (Clarence and others), Ariel Woodiwiss (Mary Bailey and others), Kate Maccluggage (Ma Bailey and others) and Nathan A. Roberts (onstage Foley Artists and Associate Sound Designer).

Who died and made Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett the patron saints of  cold-season theater in Connecticut? The screenwriting  icons of mid-20^th century Hollywood were namechecked in the January 2009 Yale Rep premiere of Rinne Groff’s Compulsion, about the competition to adapt The Diary of Anne Frank for the stage. Then, in the fall of 2009, Westport Country Playhouse did the actual Goodrich/Hackett script of The Diary of Anne Frank (with the 1997 Wendy Kesselman amendments). Now the Long Wharf Theatre offers up a stage adaptation of It’s a Wonderful Life.  Goodrich & Hackett co-wrote the screenplay of that Christmas classic (which began as a short story by Philip Van Doren Stern, originally titled The Greatest Gift and later The Man Who Was Never Born) with the film’s director Frank Capra.

The Jimmy Stewart/Donna Reed Christmas heartwarmer  is certainly no Holocaust drama. But, especially given the moody, downcast direction of director Eric Ting, you see how It’s a Wonderful Life and The Diary of Anne Frank could have flowed from the same pens. They both offer the drama of inevitable tragedy, corrupt despots bleeding honest people dry, awkward romantic scenes, stressed parents taking out their anxieties on their innocent children. The light moments in both shows exist in contrast to harrowing dark ones.

The big difference turns out to be one of practicality. The Diary of Anne Frank requires a single set. It’s a Wonderful Life involves homes, bridges, banks, business offices, a body of water or two, and Heaven. Back in the 1990s, Fairfield Country playwright Joe Landry came up with the clever idea of playing out the movie as an Old Time Radio endeavor, with a handful of actors handling the movie’s dozens of characters and a sound-effects man aurally illustrating those myriad speedy scene-changes. (The script comes with this “copyright note”: “It’s a Wonderful Live—A Live Radio Play is a derivative work for the stage based exclusively on material in the public domain.”)

Director Eric Ting has taken Landry’s basic concept and built it into a symphony of artifice, reality and sentimentality. For the first five minutes of the show, we see onstage Foley Artist Nathan A. Roberts (well known to audiences at the Yale Summer Cabaret over the last several seasons, where he led live bands for Hedwig & The Angry Inch and The Who’s Tommy and provided original music for a host of other shows) using his arsenal of sound devices to precisely mimic the arrivals and slightest movements of the radio actors as they enter the studio. He duplicates the sounds of exhaled cigarette smoke, gulped of coffee and the gyrated girdled hips of the studio’s resident sex symbol played by Kate Maccluggage.

Kate Maccluggage, who gets her own boop-boop-adoop sound effect in It's a Wonderful Life—A Live Radio Play at the Long Wharf Theatre. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

This Foley follow-around folderol is a conceit not found in Landry’s script, and it sets this It’s a Wonderful Life up as something special from the get-go. But there’s another conceptual wrinkle at the outset—Alex Moggridge (seen early this theater season as Andrei in Sarah Ruhl’s version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters at the Yale Rep) is the first one onstage, garbed in modern-day couch potato attire. From some supernatural vantage point, he marvels at the old-time radio facility, then finds himself suddenly thrust into the rapidly unfurling broadcast in the lead role of George Bailey.  Again, this is a Ting innovation not found in the Landry text. Like the Foley Artist angle, it resets our expectations. We know this story cold,  but now we are seeing it through different eyes, hearing it through a different microphones.

In this version, when George Bailey loses his bearings and gets angry and suicidal, the audience is with him, falling under the sway of swirling storm sounds and a numbing black-out. This is vintage Eric Ting drama trauma, of a piece with the rain-drenched catharsis he staged in The Bluest Eye and the rumbling subway tremors of Agnes Under the Big Top.

The cast is certainly up for this challenge. Nor do they forsake the already tricky playing styles already required by Landry’s script—the constant patter and rubber-faced mugging of old-school entertainers, the parody advertisements, the crowd-goosing signals for “APPLAUSE,” the quick-voice-change hysterics which occur when an actor enacts a multi-character dialogue single-mouthedly. As the announcer and the evil Mr. Potter, among many others, Dan Domingues comes off as a golden-age radio image of Joel Grey in Cabaret. In the sweeter female roles, Ariel Woodiwiss adds needed warmth and moxie to the proceedings. Kevyn Morrow does the most amusing about-faces, switching from young to old and cocky to withdrawn, all with dapper grace; he also develops a unique take on Clarence the Angel Second-Class, obliterating any sense of Henry Travers in the role from the Capra movie. The aforementioned Kate Maccluggage keeps her poise and classic statuesque-blonde allure even while playing elderly mothers and pouty little girls.

Alex Moggridge, meanwhile, faces whirlwind after whirlwind. There’s the unspoken muddle his out-of-time character finds himself in. There’s the stream of incidents which overwhelm good-natured George Bailey. There’s the relentless pace of the live radio broadcast. There’s that dispiriting black-out. Moggridge manages to seem bewildered yet hopeful throughout this whole soul-battering experience.

Alex Moggridge, convincingly overwhelmed in It's a Wonderful Life at the Long Wharf. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

The Long Wharf is hoping that It’s a Wonderful Life is successful enough to become an annual tradition at the theater. That’s happened for other productions of Joe Landry’s script, dating back to its very first production at the Stamford Center for the Arts in the mid-‘90s. A perennial Wonderful Life at Long Wharf would be wonderful, to be sure. It’s the kind of show you want to see twice—the first time to be surprised and moved, the next time to figure out how they did it. It’s also a play about courage, anguish and redemption which lays out the paths not taken so smoothly that the plot always seems fresh.

Yet this deliberately dark and chilly airwave-netherworld vision of a holiday classic may end up being too clever for its own good. There’s a very happy ending, of course, but it can’t equal the beautifully realized turmoil and despair of earlier scenes. Besides, this is a show which telegraphs its own artifice in its opening moments, with the actors reduced to remote sound effects and stereotyped gestures. It’s hard to create genuine sympathy for actors playing actors playing actors playing actors.

It is no small trick to bring depth and intrigue to such a well-known vehicle of Christmas spirit, while simultaneously deconstructing it. Whether these are the appropriate seasonal wrappings for a long-running crowdpleasing success remains to be seen. Like its beleaguered hero George Bailey, this It’s a Wonderful Life has an uncertain future but we should be happy it exists in the here and now.

Twenty years before Disney’s High School Musical, high school students were already trying to find ways to find a way around the tyranny of tightly-scheduled auditions.

From Everything’s Archie #132, November 1987. Script bny Jim Ruth, pencilling by Bob Bolling, inking by Chic Stone.

Couple of recent regular-news references to Samuel Beckett in (where else?) The Irish Times. Both come from the Dec. 10 edition.

[Irish history professor Roy] Foster cites Samuel Beckett as an example of how some literary figures can contribute to their own myth-making. “I’m reading the wonderful second volume of Beckett’s letters, and Beckett gave permission that only letters to do with his work could be published, which is crazy. You can’t make a distinction between what you do with work and your life. Making that kind of distinction almost reinforces myth-making. A holistic approach to life and work, and the way they interpenetrate each other, to me that is how you write a proper biography.”

—from the literary section feature “What the Dickens? Why biographers don’t always tell the whole story” by Brian O’Connell:

EVER FAILED. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail worse.

Paraphrasing Beckett, that great purveyor of despairing angst, is an irresistible response to yet another failed meeting of EU leaders in Brussels.

—from the article “Is the post-1945 European order coming to an end?” by Dan O’Brien:

Go, Irish Times! You’ve just gotta love the concept of quoting Beckett as an irresistible response to anything.

It’s hard to describe what it was like in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to see plays by Vaclav Havel produced at the Yale Rep and at college theaters throughout the country, while their author in the midst of transforming a communist country into a democratic republic and EU member now known as one of the most peaceful countries in Europe.

It felt like theater had meaning for anyone, could change things anywhere. Someone had used what he’d learned as a theater practitioner—writing, stage managing, building—to enhance his own abilities to communicate, and to broaden and vary the crowds he could communicate with.

Havel was a playwright first, and not just chronologically in his abruptly changing career. His writing was not some quirky early entry on his resume, or an amusing avocation. Havel was not like that Pope who happened to have once written a play, or like George W. Bush’s Attonrey General John Ashcroft composing “Let the Eagle Soar” and performing with the Singing Senators.

Hit Havel’s official website and you’ll see that playwriting is paramount. Upon leaving office a few years ago, he actively returned to playwriting. Both his wives worked in the theater; Olga, who was married to Havel for 32 years and died in 1996, worked with him in the 1960s at Theatre on the Balustrade. His second wife, Dagmar, has continued to act  on stage and in movies while she was First Lady.

When he was imprisoned as a dissident in the 1980s, the first thing Havel did upon being released was to write a play, Largo Desolato. That’s probably his best-known play in America, thanks in part to the Yale Rep’s 1990 production of it. But there were New York productions of Havel’s early works, including at the Public Theatre, dating back to the 1960s, at times when the plays weren’t allowed to be presented in Havel’s then-Communist homeland. In 2006, while Havel was in residency at Columbia University, the New York-based Untitled Theater Company #61 staged a “Havel Festival” of 16 of his plays—every full-length play he’d written up to that time. When the Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia produced the American premiere of Havel’s Leaving last year, Havel attended opening night.

The theater is where Havel first articulated some of his political viewpoints, and how he first connected to like-minded theorists who saw his potential as a government leader and not just a particularly articulate voice of dissent. When the revolution began in November 1989, theaters willingly went on strike so that their auditoriums could be used for meetings and rallies.

As president, Havel hobnobbed with artists, notably Lou Reed, whose early band The Velvet Underground is said to have been an inspiration in the naming of Czechoslavakia’s “Velvet Revolution.” Again, these were weighty relationships, summit meetings of a sort, not ornamental ceremonies where you drape a ribbon on someone for being famous. Havel treated writers and musicians as ambassadors, taking it as a given that their talents had political purposes and ramifications. In 1990, Havel wanted to make Frank Zappa a special envoy for culture, trade and tourism. (The Bush administration wouldn’t accept the Zappa appointment, but Havel did it anyway, unofficially.)

In his 1984 speech “Politics and Conscience” (which had to delivered at the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail by fellow Czech-born playwright Tom Stoppard because Havel was not allowed to travel), Havel says:

I favor “antipolitical politics,” that is, politics not as the technology of power and manipulation, of cybernetic rule over humans or as the art of the utilitarian, but politics as one of the ways of seeking and achieving meaningful lives, of protecting them and serving them. I favor politics as practical morality, as service to the truth, as essentially human and humanly measured care for our fellow humans. It is, I presume, an approach which, in this world, is extremely impractical and difficult to apply in dailv life. Still, I know no better alternative.

The Yale Cabaret has announced its offerings for the Spring semester. You could say it’s a slight more mainstream selection than the nine autumn shows were, because a couple of titles are very familiar (even if the contents of the shows themselves are not) and a couple of others are well-known in college theater circles. The rest, in keeping with the last few seasons of antic Cabaret experimentation, are all-new.

One new wrinkle in this announcement is the new credit “Proposed by” where “Directed by” or “Produced by” or “Adapted by” or even “Written by” might customarily be. This reflects how open-ended certain behind-the-scenes roles have become in the space, and unhierarchical things have become in this era of “devised” projects and “ensemble” works. “Proposed by” conveys the value of the initial inspiration for a production without getting bogged down in details too early on.

In any case, here’s the spring Cabaret season:

January 12-14: reWILDING, proposed by Martyna Majok. Described as “a haunting … hidden woodland community of memories and mysteries, strange humor, complicated beauty, private stories and live music.

Jan. 19-21: The Cabaret is dark.

Jan. 26-28: Brainsongs, or The Play About the Dinosaur Farm, proposed by Gabe Levey. Described as “part clown show, part vaudeville … an eensy-weensy piece of handcrafted theater that celebrates the power of the imagination and the implicit risk in shamelessly pursuing one’s fun.”

Feb. 9-11: The Cabaret is dark.

Feb. 16-18: Dracula, by Mac Wellman, proposed by Jack Tamburri. Wellman may well be the most produced playwright in the history of the Yale Cabaret. Personally, I’ve seen two different productions of his Sincerity Forever there, two different productions of his Seven Blowjobs, and an unusual-for-the-Cabaret stop on a tour of his play about Ambrose Bierce, Bitter Bierce, starring Steve Mellor. I seem to remember Cabaret productions of Wellman’s Whirligig and Crowbar happening as well. The playwright’s Dracula dates back to 1987. Jack Tamburri, in the directing program at the School of Drama, helmed the Yale Summer Cabaret Shakespeare Festival production of The Tempest this past June.

Feb. 23-25: Clutch Yr Amplified Heart Tightly and Pretend, proposed by Adam Rigg. Described as an upbeat “an exaltation of dance for anyone willing to give us a hug.” Adam Rigg is a scenic design student who was responsible for the multi-disciplinary, fantasy-filled puppetry adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray at the Cabaret last April.

March 1-3: Funnyhouse of a Negro by Adrienne Kennedy, proposed by Miriam Hyman. Surrealist social critic Kennedy’s breakthrough one-act play was written over 50 years ago now, but is more often read than seen. Miriam Hyman was The Queen in this week’s Yale School of Drama production of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, and also appeared in the YSD productions of A Streetcar Named Desire and the Carlotta Festival premiere of The Tall Girls, among other things.

March 8-10: The Yiddish King Lear, by Jacob Gordin, proposed by Whitney Dibo and Martha Kaufman. A revisiting of a late 19^th century example of a reconceptualized classic, Der yidisher kenig was Gordin’s attempt to bring naturalism and contemporary relevance to Shakespeare. Interesting that the Cabaret would be doing this mere weeks after the Long Wharf Theatre premieres its Vietnam-era reworking of Macbeth. Whitney Dibo is in the School of Drama dramaturgy program (she produced the dramaturg-heavy evening of monologues The Creation at the Cabaret last semester) and Martha Kaufman is a playwriting student.

March 15-17: The Cabaret is dark.

March 22-24: Underworld, proposed by Ethan Heard. A new version of the Orpheus myth, “blurring the boundaries between concert, play and multimedia event.” Kind of like what Offenbach did with it? I’m guessing much different. Ethan Heard is in the YSD directing program, and was also active in theater on campus as a Yale undergrad. He directed the musical Trannequin! at the Cabaret last March.

March 29-31: Chamber Music by Arthur Kopit, proposed by Katie McGerr and Carmen Ziles. Chamber Music is a one-act ensemble drama of female identity and empowerment beloved by school drama programs because its large cast of young female performers, yet no two productions of this versatile and shaded script are ever alike. New Haven’s Educational Center for the Arts performing arts high school did a production a few years ago, and the great Kopit actually visited the class to discuss his work with them. Katie McGerr directed the recent Cabaret producer of Howard Brenton’s Christie in Love. Carmen Zilles acted in the Cabaret’s fall semester-ending production of Wallace Shawn’s A Thought in Three Parts and also had a small role in Persona earlier in the season. Like Christie in Love, which was based on an actual murder investigation, Chamber Music is history-minded. Its cast includes representations of Amelia Earhart, Joan of Arc, Gertrude Stein, Spain’s Queen Isabella the First and other strong-willed women of yore.

April 12-14: Carnival/Invisible, proposed by Benjamin Fainstein. Described as “a festive variety show inspired by American circuses and nomadic tent shows.” The current Cabaret regime probably doesn’t realize this, but for several seasons in the mid-1990s the Cabaret season ender was a circus-styled show. It’s a wonderful way to cap the semester and welcome spring. Fainstein is a YSD Dramaturgy student who most recently worked on the Yale Rep production of A Doctor in Spite of Himself.

Yale Cabaret shows each have five public performances: Thursday at 8 p.m., then Friday and Saturday at both 8 & 11 p.m. at 217 Park St., New Haven. Tickets are $15, $10 for students. Discount memberships are available. All details at www.yalecabaret.org, (203) 432-1566.

It's A Wonderful Life at Long Wharf. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

It's A(nother) Wonderful Life at Trinity Rep. Photo by Mark Turek.

Not only is It’s a Wonderful Life playing at Long Wharf Theatre, a different production based on the same Joe Landry live-radio-style adaptation has returned to Rhode Island’s Trinity Rep.
Long Wharf is hopeful that It’s a Wonderful Life will become an annual holiday tradition, a la A Christmas Carol at Hartford Stage. Or A Christmas Carol at the Shubert.

Trinity Rep not only has begun its It’s a Wonderful Life tradition, it’s already got an A Christmas Carol that’s been running for 35 winters, since the legendary Adrian Hall ran the place.

As parent who brought both my daughters to the Long Wharf rendition, I second the wise advice from today’s Boston Globe review by Steve Greenlee of the Trinity Rep production:

It’s a breezy way to acclimate children to grown-up theater and a lesson in how families used to consume entertainment—gathered together around the radio rather than off in separate corners of the house with a bunch of digital devices in our palms.
That’s not to say It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play is children’s entertainment. It’s not. Anyone thinking of bringing their kids to this production ought to screen the original movie for them first and get them up to speed on the story. Otherwise this play, which moves along briskly, will go right over young heads.

The Criterion Cinema in New Haven can help you out this weekend. The cinema has booked the Capra film of It’s a Wonderful Life as both its Insomnia Theater screening tonight (Sarturday, Dec. 17) at 11:30 p.m. and its “Movies and Mimosas” presentation at 11:30 a.m. Sunday, Dec. 18.

Hot on the snowy heels of Eric Ting’s production of It’s a Wonderful Life, which opened this week, The Long Wharf Theatre has announced the cast for Ting’s impending production of Macbeth 1969, Jan. 18- Feb. 12 on the selfsame mainstage. Several familiar faces may catch your eye.

Ting has reconceived Shakespeare’s Macbeth as a sort of fever dream affecting a solder in a VA hospital during the time of the war of the Viet Nam. The six-person cast handles all the roles in the play, and are labeled “Soldier 1 (McKinley Belcher III), Soldier 2 (Barret O’Brien), Nurse 1 (Socorro Santiago), Nurse 2 (Shirine Babb), Nurse 3 (Jackie Chung) and Politician (George).” Soldier 1 is Macbeth, Soldier 2 handles the roles of Banquo and Macduff (who in this context is an anti-war activist and draft dodger), Nurse 2 is Lady Macbeth, Nurse 3 is Lady Macduff. Ting adapted the script himself, and sets Macbeth 1969 on a stormy Christmas eve in a hospital war in “Middle America. An isolated place, far from the war.”

I’m particularly excited to see Barret O’Brien back on a New Haven stage. I raved about him regularly during his student years at the Yale School of Drama, where he held crowds spellbound as Dionysus in The Bacchae, Peer in Peer Gynt and Prospero in the Tempest.

Socorro Santiago was Aunt May in Ting’s production of John Patrick Shanley’s Italian-American Reconciliation last season.

George Kulp is a stalwart performer in the Connecticut small theater scene, active with the New Haven Theatre Company and Theatre Four here in New Haven, Square One Theatre in Stratford and others. You would have just seen him in the NHTC production of Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer had it not been postponed until Spring 2012. Kulp was Hal Turner on the TV soap Ryan’s Hope.

Jackie Chung is a member of New York’s Ensemble Studio Theatre, where she’s taken part in its drama marathons. She’s appeared everywhere from the Flea to the Public to the Ma-Yi Theater company.

Shirine Babb has done a TheatreWorks USA children’s theater tour with Play to Win: The Jackie Robinson Story and lots of Shakespeare, particularly with American Shakespeare Theatre and Old Globe/University of San Diego.

The Macbeth in Macbeth 1969 is McKinley Belcher III, who recently was Tom Robinson in an adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird at the Bay Street Theatre in –Sag Harbor, was the Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice for the Kingsmen Shakespeare Company at California Lutheran University (where he was previously in a production of yes, Macbeth) and appeared in Romeo and Juliet at the Hollywood American Legion Theater.

Macbeth 1969’s set is designed by Brooklyn-based, New Haven-born Yale School of Art & Architecture grad Mimi Lien. Costumes are by Toni-Leslie James, the busy New York designer who did The Bluest Eye with Ting at Long Wharf in 2008 and also did the theater’s recent production of The Old Masters.

Lighting is by Tyler Micoleau, master of the Long Wharf Stage II lighting grid due to his sublimely shadowy Agnes Under the Big Top, Shipwrecked! and The Shoulder; Micoleau also did Good Person of New Haven and The Shoulder on the Long Wharf mainstage and has done tons of regional and Off Broadway lights.

Sound designer Ryan Rumery worked with Ting on his Long Wharf mainstage adaptation of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.

“The initial idea,” Bert Bernardi banters, “was that Santa has a superhero that’s there all day long to save the day.

“The next step was adding the word ‘Teen’ to Santa. It’s just so incongruous. The common image of teens is sullen, disobedient. What if this kid has all this other spirit?

“He’s a 16-year-old boy obsessed with the holidays. His family just doesn’t understand!”

Teen Santa. It’s such a catchy concept that you’re surprised there wasn’t a ‘50s drive-in movie with that title, alongside I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein.

But no, the latest family-friendly musical theater frolic from Pantochino Productions (which Bernardi runs with his partner Jimmy Johansmeyer) is all-original. And so appealing that rather than wait until Christmas 2012 as originally planned, Bernardi started writing and planning Teen Santa immediately after his last holiday hit, the Halloween-timed Cinderella Skeleton. It all came together so quickly—Christmas magic!—that it’s premiering now, for seven performances Dec. 15-18. Details here.

Pantochino Productions was unable to book the ECA Arts Hall (where they staged Cinderella Skeleton) this time around, as it’s being used for the ECA’s own production of much different sort of shows about exceptional teens, David and Lisa. Instead, Teen Santa lifts off from Yale’s Off Broadway venue, which has a Broadway address but is in fact entered from down the well-landscaped alley behind Toad’s Place.

“The proximity to Toad’s Place is great,” Bernardi raves, “because of the rock and roll connection. There’s a live band throughout this show. There’s a concerty feeling to the whole thing. I’ve never done of my children’s shows with a live band before, ever.”

The band is question is an actual working three-piece punk combo, Nothing2Simple, from West Haven. Bernardi found them while scouting the noted  youth hang-out The Space in Hamden, in search of teen musicians with the rare sense of adventure that might bring them into a project called Teen Santa.

In the show, Nothing2 Simple is playing songs by Justin Rugg, who composed the tunes to fit Bernardi’s lyrics. Rugg had an acting role in Cinderella Skeleton, and this cast features two other veterans of that bony fairy tale, as well as professional actors from New York City and Long Island plus some students from Hamden High School. So there’s some cool continuity, though the style has shifted from goth fashions to punk rhythms.

“Tickets are selling well, and I’m getting calls from all over the state,” Bernardi marvels. This bodes well for more Pantochino Productions in New Haven, after decades of having to venture to Bridgeport for a taste of his quirky and unconventional kid-theater fare. Bernardi helmed the children’s theater at Downtown Cabaret Theatre for 28 years, only recently moving on to other pastures. He’s encouraged by the success of Cinderella Skeleton, which did well despite a freak October snowstorm, and by the number of nice performing spaces in New Haven. He says we can expect more Pantochino pick-me-ups ‘round these parts.

Hey, Teen Santa brought us just what we asked for!