By Harry Haun
12 Jun 2011

	Mark Jacoby and Sebastian Arcelus in Elf.
	photo by Joan Marcus

Elf popped into existence this season, hopefully an instant holiday tradition to fill the nine-week void left by past years' seasonal charmers like How the Grinch Stole Christmas and A Christmas Carol. It asked the musical question, "Can a guy who stowed away on Santa's sled as an infant and spent his next 30 years toiling in the toy factory at the North Pole find happiness as a Macy's elf on 34th Street?" Will Ferrell posed the question first in his 2003 film, and that was re-crafted for the stage by a couple of expert musical-book writers — Annie's Thomas Meehan and The Drowsy Chaperone's Bob Martin — and a couple of young old-soul tunesmiths, The Wedding Singer's Matthew Sklar and Chad Beguelin, who trimmed the tree with songs of the season ("Christmastime," "Nobody Cares about Santa," "There Is a Santa Claus" and their take-away hit, "A Christmas Song"). The musical mellowed the story considerably, giving it more heart and humanity, blurring the cinematic broad strokes so that a big, action confrontation involving Central Park Rangers and the Christmas believers was averted in favor of a more human, less physical crisis. "We went through a lot of different things in Act Two because the Act Two in the movie was so filled with cinematic action it was un-doable on stage," recalled director Casey Nicholaw, who had spent the three previous Christmases around Meehan's Christmas tree working on the show with its creators. "It was about making up a second act, so I'm really proud of how it worked out. It has been an absolute joy. It's been like a Christmas party for all of us."

	Nick Adams in Priscilla Queen of the Desert.
	photo by Joan Marcus

Now reigning at the Palace is Priscilla Queen of the Desert, a pink bus so christened by the three drag artists it is transporting into Australia's dusty Outback. From certain angles, the bus could pass for an oblong jukebox on wheels — a not-inappropriate allusion since the vehicle is fueled with three decades of pop and disco sounds, from The Village People and Dionne Warwick to Cyndi Lauper and Pat Benatar. Director Simon Phillips reveals there've been massive changes in the show since he first workshopped it Down Under five years ago — not the least of which is the new play list he supplied stateside. "Madonna's taken the place of Kylie Minogue, who's popular in London and Australia but not really known in this country," admits Phillips, who keeps those colored lights going when the past musically spins by. Designers Tim Chappel and Lizzy Gardiner won an Oscar for outfitting the 1994 film with all the wit and imagination that $15,000 can buy. For the Broadway version, their budget has jumped a hundred-fold, spread over 500 zany costumes.

Which came first — the age-old question goes — the music or the lyrics or, lest we forget, the book? In the case of The Book of Mormon, the answer is all of the above, and they came simultaneously in a creative musical mash-up among two guys from TV's "South Park" (Matt Stone and Trey Parker) and one of the kids from Avenue Q (Robert Lopez). "That's kinda the way musical comedies need to be written," avers Lopez. "You need to have people in the room so the comedy can happen. It wasn't always thunderbolts. There were a lot of just sitting around and staring at each other and surfing the web, but, when we would make each other laugh, it was a lot of fun." They decided to collaborate on a musical about Joseph Smith and the creation of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints when they discovered that all three were working on that same idea. "They said, 'This is too much of a coincidence,'" Lopez reports. "'We love Avenue Q. We love this guy, and he loves Mormons, and we love Mormons, and we love musicals, and he writes musicals. Let's do it together.'" And so, as they say, it was written.