The Moment Before Everything Changes
Alexis SoloskiDecember 4, 2014: Despite the hefty confections at its center, the Irish Repertory Theater’s A Christmas Memory, a musical version of the Truman Capote short story, is as slight as a popcorn strand, as wispy as tinsel. A tale of a boy’s attachment to his childlike cousin, it is an exercise in holiday nostalgia. In cold blood? More like in warm batter. In Duane Poole’s adaptation, the story begins in the 1950s, when Buddy (the moist-eyed Ashley Robinson), a writer struggling with his second book, returns to the Alabama house where he once lived with three elderly cousins. As he sits at the kitchen table, he’s borne back to his last Christmas there, which his younger self (Silvano Spagnuolo) spent in the glad company of his pup, Queenie, and his cousin Sook (a deglamorized Alice Ripley). Sook is a believer in fairy tales and Bible stories. Kind and playful, she has a marvelous sense of occasion. “Oh, can you feel it?” she asks the young Buddy elatedly. “The excitement in the air of an adventure about to begin?”
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