Kris Kringle believes he is Santa Claus. The children visiting New York’s Macy’s department store Christmas grotto believe he is, too – all except Susan, a sceptical small girl of preternaturally hardened disposition. Will Kringle convert her? Maddison Thew and Tim Parker make a great duo, tough and unsentimental. Thew maintains an element of grit throughout Susan’s carefully modulated transition from spiky suspicion to open-eyed wonder. As he waits for a supreme court judge to rule on his sanity and identity, Parker’s Kringle endures searing self-doubt. It’s terrible to see: what happens to faith if Santa Claus no longer believes in himself?
This is the magic of director Gemma Bodinetz’s production: like the original 1947 film, it makes a fantastical storyline gloriously, satisfyingly credible. Less satisfying, though, is the relationship between Susan’s divorced mum, Doris, wrapped in a protective carapace of cynicism, and Fred, a demobbed army captain, rookie lawyer and incurable romantic. Caitlin Berry and Stuart Reid are good at sparky confrontation, but, in this 1963 musical reworking by Meredith Willson (book, music and lyrics), their transition from animosity to attraction feels more sexist than screwball. We need more access to their characters’ vulnerabilities if we’re to root for their romance.
Willson’s crescendo-heavy score is spurred along at a cracking pace by musical director George Francis. Olivia du Monceau’s multi-level set and Tom Jackson Greaves’s choreography whisk us from department store to courtroom via points in between, while the hyperactive, all-singing, all-dancing, multi-role-playing cast sends us out into a dark winter’s night with the feeling that, in the words of the most enduring song of the piece, “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas”.
• At the Liverpool Playhouse theatre until 4 January 2020
