Fox’s holiday gift? A live-musical take on ‘A Christmas Story’
It still has the leg lamp, the “triple dog dare” and the caution that “You’ll shoot your eye out”: This holiday season, television is offering another version of “A Christmas Story.”
In addition to TBS’ and TNT’s traditional 24-hour marathon of the original, Jean Shepherd-inspired 1983 movie on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, Fox is presenting “A Christmas Story Live!,” a production of the stage musical that the film inspired. Airing Sunday, Dec. 17, it features Andy Walken – a Seattle youngster discovered in a nationwide casting search – as Ralphie Parker, the ever-optimistic youngster who hopes to be gifted with a Red Ryder BB gun, despite his mother’s (Maya Rudolph) warning that it’s dangerous.
Matthew Broderick will serve as the tale’s narrator, with other roles filled by Chris Diamantopoulos (“Silicon Valley”) as Ralphie’s gruff, furnace-battling father, Jane Krakowski (“Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” “30 Rock”) as schoolteacher Miss Shields, and Rudolph’s fellow “Saturday Night Live” alum Ana Gasteyer as the mother of one of Ralphie’s friends. “In Living Color” veteran David Alan Grier returns to Fox to play the piece’s Santa Claus.
The musical first was staged in Kansas City in 2009, then played Seattle and had a national tour before its 2012 debut on Broadway, where original “Ralphie” Peter Billingsley was among its producers and it garnered three Tony Award nominations.
“For years, our Christmas movies were sentimental and sort of cozy and warm, and here came this movie that wasn’t that,” says executive producer Marc last year’s Platt, “Grease who also Live!” oversaw for Fox. “It was subversive and funny and sort of recognizable (in) all the family experiences each one of us have. We could relate to it. In taking it from the stage to the live television event, we’re going to first and foremost deliver the humor and the comedy of the movie as it’s represented on stage.”
Then there’s the work of composers Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, also of the Platt-coproduced movie “La La Land” – which brought them Oscars for the song “City of Stars” – and Broadway’s “Dear Evan Hansen,” for which the duo earned Tony Awards. Platt explains, “We’re going to take fantastic music that (they) wrote that leads into the subversive comedy, but also extracts from the subtext the warmth of that family ... and there will be new music as well. So we’ll deliver the ‘A Christmas Story’ story, but it’s a live event.”
Also the co-composer (with Pasek) of songs for the new Hugh Jackman movie “The Greatest Showman,” Paul reasons that Ralphie makes an ideal musical character through “his fantasies and his wild imagination, and those are sort of screaming out to become musical numbers and to be realized on stage with choreography and production values that are very different from the classic film. That’s why it felt to us like, ‘Oh, we’re not just taking this great, wonderful title and this story that everyone loves and throwing it on stage, but we can make things special about it that are just for the stage.’
“I think similarly, that’s what we’re also planning on doing with the television broadcast,” Paul notes, “what can we do that’s just for TV that’s very special with the same story, because it does ‘sing’ so much. There are characters who are larger than life. There’s a largerthan-life imagination at the center of the story. And it’s a kid with a really big want at Christmastime, and those wants sing in a really special and exciting way, at least for us as songwriters.”