Bland 'Elf the Musical' loses charm, energy in transition from screen to stage
Transforming the exuberant, fan-favorite movie “Elf” into a family-friendly musical must have seemed like a no-brainer.
Not so.
The considerable charm of the featherweight movie depends on a wildly enthusiastic and trippily innocent central performance by Will Ferrell and sturdy supporting performances by Zooey Deschanel, James Caan and Bob Newhart, which are enough to compensate for the lack of a coherent and compelling plot.
Without those performances, the musical is left simply ticking off plot points and attempting to adjust for the lack of an emotional core with big, busy, repetitive production numbers.
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At two and a half hours, the production now touring at the Palace Theatre through the weekend is simply too long to keep younger audience members entertained, and too bland and didactic for their elders.
The Tuesday opening night performance was lengthened even further by a half-hour delay before the show began and a 20-minute pause less than half an hour after the show began for “technical difficulties.”
The musical, unnecessarily framed as a story Santa is telling the audience, follows the arc of the movie, with which most viewers will already be familiar. Buddy (Cody Garcia), a human who has grown to the age of 30 believing that he is an elf, is disabused of this notion, and is sent off by Santa (Mark Fishback) to find his human father (Christopher Robert Smith), a workaholic who would put Scrooge to shame.
Dropped off at Macy's, he meets Jovie (played at Tuesday night's performance by Cait Zuckerman), who is working as an elf in Santa's workshop, and falls instantly in love, despite the fact that in this version of the story, Jovie is so dispirited and generally crabby that it's hard to see where the attraction lies.
Garcia is pleasant and peppy, but they lack nearly all the antic energy of Ferrell, and in the midst of all the general singing and dancing, would fade into the scenery if it weren't for their vivid green costume.
Like the rest of the cast, Garcia has a serviceable but not exceptional voice, tending towards flatness. The generic music numbers that they're given to sing by composer Matthew Sklar and lyricist Chad Beguelin (who collaborated on “The Prom”) - mostly big, instantly forgettable ballads or soggy jazz numbers - don't allow for much nuance.
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While the cast does its best to slog through the material, they're hampered by the fact that the characters are barely one-dimensional, jokes about New Jersey or iPads are stale, and there is so little in the way of plot that a major section of the second act is given over to retelling the story of Buddy in the form of a picture book pitch to a greedy publisher.
For a supposedly hopeful Christmas musical, this one is surprisingly sour. Jovie's big number, “Never Fall in Love (with an Elf),” details her unsatisfactory life, Santas real and fake complain that “Nobody Cares About Santa,” and Buddy's pre-adolescent half-brother (Jackson James) and his mom (Caitlin Lester-Sams) unite in bewailing the inadequacies of their dad/husband in “I'll Believe in You.”
More mechanical than magical, the show can easily be skipped by those who already have enough on their holiday plates.
At a glance
Broadway in Columbus and the Columbus Association for the Performing Arts will present “Elf the Musical” at the Palace Theatre, 34 W. Broad St. at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday; 8 p.m. Dec. Saturday; 2 and 8 p.m. Sunday; and 1 and 6:30 p.m. Dec. 18. Tickets start at $31. (cbusarts.com)
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: National production of Elf the Musical falls flat at Palace Theatre
