By J. Scott Hill

This time of year, I hear people say, “Don’t forget the reason for the season.”  Depending on what you believe, the reason for the season may be the birth of Jesus, the solstice and the lengthening days that follow, the miracle of the oil, or something else entirely.  Although the details of our reasons for the season may differ, the spirit of the season is generally thought to be universal — peace, giving, good fellowship.  According to The Christmas Schooner, currently running at Theatre at the Center, the reasons for the season are ardent German jingoism, the creation of a secondary revenue stream, and profit over safety.

From 1996 through 2008, the Bailiwick Repertory Theatre ran The Christmas Schooner as its holiday show.  The Bailiwick closed earlier this year but will return in a different location as a new and reorganized company, Bailiwick Chicago, in the spring of 2010.  This show was a huge success at the Bailiwick and is beloved by many — theatregoers and critics alike; I am not among them.

The basic story of The Christmas Schooner — a 19th century Michigan schooner captain determined to sail the icy waters of Lake Michigan well-past safe sailing season to deliver a load of Christmas trees to Chicago — could have been rendered in a heartwarming, deeply moving manner.  The actors did everything possible to try to accomplish this. The songs by Julie Shannon went a long way toward this end.

But, the play’s the thing.

Playwright John Reeger is a talented and accomplished Chicago actor who has often been seen onstage at Court Theatre, as well as Drury Lane Oakbrook, and even at Theatre at the Center.  Unfortunately, this script does not rise to the proven and immense talent of its author. Reeger’s script is sometimes warm and funny, though never organically so, nor is it character-driven in its humor.  Always the laughs come through some sort of schtick (given all the German cultural pride in this script, I should not sully the Yiddish word schtick here, but stick with the German Stück).  Mostly, the book for this show glorifies the capitalistic impulse that has squelched the very spirit of the holiday season, so much so that the ten-minute epilogue smacks of a short industrial propaganda film one might see during a factory tour.

The show opens with the Stossel family patriarch, Gustav, insulting his daughter-in-law for not being a true, pure German, but rather a German Swiss, a Schweizerdeutsche — Switzerland being an ethnically and linguistically mixed country.  The actors do their utmost to keep this scene light and loving.  While the scene continues on about the Stossels being immigrants and having a new ethnic identity as Americans, it is still a shaky foundation upon which to build a family-oriented holiday show.  It would be a simplistic fantasy to believe that such attitudes did not and do not exist, but they really have no place in a show that Theatre at the Center bills as “already becoming a perennial holiday classic.”

The story continues with an income-bright, safety-dim entrepreneurial idea. Safe sailing season on the Great Lakes has ended for the winter.  Captain Peter Stossel needs to clear the small trees choking his timberland near the paper-mill town of Manistique on the southern shore of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.  A letter from his cousin in Chicago gives him a moneymaking epiphany: take a boatload of this Michigan scrub pine down to Chicago under nigh-impossible sailing conditions and sell it as Christmas trees to German-descended Chicagoans.  Many such voyages were made.  Lives were lost, but the valuable freight still got to Chicago every Christmas, and the money was still made.

Brandon Dahlquist plays the clever, German-descended captain, Peter Stossel.  Earlier this year, he played Ernst Ludwig in Cabaret at Drury Lane Oakbrook — complex and subtle in his underlying Nazi evil; here, his performance is unceasingly positive and open and good-natured.  Dahlquist gives more complexity to his portrayal than the archetypal character demands.

The captain’s wife, Alma Stossel, is played by Cory Goodrich.  Goodrich is the best singer in this production and really showcases her chops during “Loving Sons.”  As an actor, Goodrich takes a stock character and brings her to life in three dimensions.  Goodrich recently played another fretting mother at Theatre at the Center — Vi Moore (the preacher’s wife) in Footloose; her interpretations of the two similar roles are wildly different from one another.

The phenomenal Peter Kevoian plays Gustav as a loving Vater merely giving his daughter-in-law a gentle ribbing in the beginning, showing his strength and kindheartedness throughout.  Kevoian is a dynamite actor and a talented singer and plies his craft deftly as this cantankerous curmudgeon.  He is the tough leather binding holding this family’s story together.

The ensemble is mostly terrific — with extra kudos to Ronald Keaton as Oskar (the comic-relief sailor) and Mitchell Rose as the teenaged Karl (Peter and Alma’s son). The three principals — Dahlquist, Goodrich, and Kevoian — are like….  I was going to put a fairly unkind simile here that stressed that these are excellent performers who outshine the material they are performing, but that would not be in keeping with the spirit of the season.

If you loved The Christmas Schooner at Bailiwick, if it was an annual part of your holiday season, then by all means go see these wonderful actors in what may be the finest possible production of this show.  If you are a theatre tech junkie, it is worth the price of admission just to marvel at Scenic Designer Jack Magaw’s hydraulic schooner prow!  If you are looking for a show to fill you with the spirit of the holiday season, however, The Christmas Schooner may not float your boat.

2 STARS

( “The Christmas Schooner“ runs through Dec 20, 2009, at Theatre at the Center, 1040 Ridge Rd., Munster, Indiana.  219-836-3255)

Theatre at the Center (Munster,IN)

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