The material is irredeemably weak.
Let’s zoom out for a minute. Nunsense, the musical revue that has spawned six sequels, including Nuncrackers, this Christmas-season variation, is thin at best. In Nunsense, a small group of nuns from the Little Sisters of Hoboken convent are forced to put on a variety show so they can raise enough money to bury the remaining dead from an accidental poisoning that wiped out most of their order. (The convent’s cook, Sister Julia, Child of God prepared the fatal vichyssoise.)
As I said in my review of Metro Theatre’s production of Nunsense in March, there’s not a lot of tension in this: we know the sisters will raise the money somehow. But at least Nunsense has a premise.
Nuncrackers is not so lucky. Nothing holds it together. Sure, the nuns’ Christmas gifts to each other have disappeared, but this perfunctory mention sparks nothing that even vaguely resembles a plot.
And, while Nunsense provides a framework for some great bits — throughout, Sister Mary Amnesia works a rod puppet named Sinter Mary Annette, for instance — Nuncrackers does its performers no such favours. Sure, Sister Mary Annette appears briefly, but to greatly reduced effect. Mostly, we’re just left to sit and watch a series of arbitrary and mostly uninspired musical numbers. The Act 1 opener, for instance, is titled “Christmas Time Is Nunsense Time.” Okay. “Three Hundred Sixty-Four Days”, which opens Act 2, is a generic song about holiday shopping. Who cares?
To be clear, my fundamental complaint here is with the material, not the performances in this Metro Theatre production.
Everybody in this cast of five hands in perfectly respectable work, considering the circumstances. In Act 2, where the songs are generally more interesting than in Act 1, Mary Cleaver, who’s playing Sister Robert Anne, sings the revue’s only emotionally charged numbers, “Jesus Was Born in Brooklyn” and “All I Want for Christmas” — they contain their own mini-arc about paternal abandonment — and she does a lovely job with them.
Jennifer Suratos (Sister Mary Regina, the Mother Superior) offers charismatic stage presence and strong vocals, including in “A Carnival Christmas”. And, always self-assured, Paula Higgins (Sister Mary Hubert), wails it out in “It’s Better to Give that to Receive.”
But, under Suratos’s direction, other aspects of the show are a mess. The Act 1 closer, the nuns’ botched performance of a sequence from The Nutcracker, is a wit-free waste of time. I suspect more creative attention from choreographer Shelley Stewart Hunt would have helped.
Harika Xu’s lighting is, frankly, awful. In number after number, when a singer is walking across the stage, they are forced to negotiate repeated areas of darkness to access islands of illumination. Again and again, Xu illuminates the tableaux that end musical numbers with spotlights that hit only random portions of the image.
Let’s hope Metro Theatre doesn’t insist on working its way through the rest of the Nunsense canon, which includes Meshuggah-Nuns! and Nunsensations: the Nunsense Vegas Revue.
NUNCRACKERS Book, music, and lyrics by Dan Goggin. Directed by Jennifer Suratos. A Metro Theatre production running at the Metro Theatre until November 14. Tickets and information.
PHOTO CREDIT: (Photo of Paula Higgins as Sister Mary Hubert by Moonrider Productions.)
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