Pear Photography
Photo: Bill Jackson as Father Christmas on the set.
Holiday stories this time of year can feel like they draw from a very narrow range of themes. The new show debuting at the Brumder Mansion manages to freshen up old themes about the importance of selflessness and giving at the harshest time of the year. Playwright Liz Shipe’s Upon a Midnight Clear: A Tale of Jack Frost playfully toys with a few ancient European legends with a stylish sense of humor that breezes briskly across a small stage.
Cory Jefferson Hagen plays Jack Frost--a man charged with a very important task who is taking a year off to be somewhat mortal. He’s fallen in love with Gwen: a mortal girl played by Bridget Christine Kelly. The first meaningful interaction in the play happens between the two of them. Shipe hand Hagen and Kelly kind of a challenge.The love between Jack Frost and his dear Gwen becomes a central focus of the plot. Hagen and Kelly have to render all the charm and warmth of two people in love necessary to get an audience emotionally invested in them and they have to do so in a very brief span of time before the conflict is introduced, complicated and resolved. (This IS, by the standard of holiday fare, quite a short program.) Thankfully, Kelly is charming enough and Hagen is nervous enough to make for an interesting dynamic. Shipe, (who also wrote Lady In Waiting for Theatre RED) writes very strong female characters. Sure, this play is set in antiquity, but Gwen has a strength and individuality that Kelly brings to the stage quite well.
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
For his part, Hagen is given a better opportunity assert his strengths as an actor when his family shows-up uninvited. As he is the mythical figure of Jack Frost, his family ends up being the equally mythical Father Christmas and Wodan (who everybody knows as Old Man Winter.) David Franz plays a fraternal figure to Jack. The script sort of plays him up as the older brother who is a lot less mature, which is odd considering everyone here is immortal and multiple centuries old. There’s some very crisp dialogue between Wodan and Frost and it’s a lot of fun to watch as Franz and Hagen are quite good with fast-paced, witty dialogue.
Shipe has written a clever challenge for Bill Jackson in the role of Father Christmas--Frost’s paternal immortal figure. He’s supposed to be that figure we all know as Santa Clause before he got turned into a jolly old man by popular culture. Jackson is a thin, towering man with a deep, commanding voice. He’s not exactly the warm, cuddly guy with the big, soft beard and rosy cheeks. Shipe throws just enough hints at the modern conception of Santa Claus to hint at his role in the plot. Jackson makes the Santa Claus aspects of Father Christmas seem like a perfectly natural part of a very complicated personality that includes petty anger and overbearing paternalism and vanity. Jackson juggles it all with a very deft wit. It’s a lot of fun to watch.
As the plot develops, we run into a couple of other characters. Madison McCarthy plays Katrina--a magical mutation of the Krampus--a dark figure that was said to have taken away naughty children. McCarthy plays the character as an attractive, sensually seductive enchantress who has evidently realized that it’s easier to take kids away if they don’t run away from you screaming. Bryan Quinn is given the task of playing the Sandman. Being someone who was in high school in the early 1990s, I still picture Sandman as Neil Gaiman’s dark, brooding figure with long, flowing black robes, white skin and a little goth girl sister who hangs out with the nearly-dead. That Quinn was able to suspend this conception of the guy for me for even a few moments is quite an accomplishment. Quinn plays him as kind of a pleasantly weird guy with a strange sense of humor, which really makes a lot of sense considering the nature of dream. Like everything else here, Quinn is a lot of fun.
A big thing driving the fun of the script is the fact that the vast majority of the dialogue is between immortals who have known each other for many, many centuries. They’re very powerful people, but they’re still people and Shipe does an excellent job of balancing the fantastic nature of their existence against the very real and relatable emotional side. There are a lot of holiday traditions on local stages. I could be quite happy with this becoming another one of them.
Milwaukee Entertainment Group’s Upon a Midnight Clear: A Tale of Jack Frost runs through Dec. 21 at the Brumder Mansion on 3046 W. Wisconsin Ave.
