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The holidays are usually filled with overly sweet treats and entertainment for kids. But adults sometimes need a deeper reminder of the spirit of the season as well.
Enter “Mrs. Christmas,” a delightful new musical play by Tom Jacobson having its world premiere at the Aurora Theater this month that balances a nostalgic look at the past with meaning in the present — all with a twinkle in the eye.
Linda Libby plays a middle-aged woman dressed in red and white trying to inhabit her mother’s shoes as the town’s “Mrs. Christmas” — making crafts and baking cookies in August to freeze for December and spreading cheer by driving an actual sleigh through the streets.
Jacquelyne Estrada’s set design on the Aurora’s cozy black-box stage features lots of warm Christmasy details, including a lighted tree, a reindeer and a fireplace aglow, and also plenty of props, including a rather scary apple-headed doll and a Japanese artifact lost in translation of Santa Claus nailed to a cross.
As the woman reminisces about all that her mother did for Christmas while she was growing up — seemingly only to mortify her in front of her friends — she also dives deep into the history of Christmas carols, some in German or Latin and a few hilariously weird, singing many of them in an engagingly melodic voice.
During one song, the “Corpus Christi Carol” from the early 1500s, she uses shadow puppets to enact a pelican giving her very blood so that her young survive, making a literal analogy to Jesus dying on the cross, which is poignant but also kind of funny in its extremeness.
As directed by Karole Foreman, Libby is a lively entertainer, keeping us riveted throughout the show’s roughly 90 minutes with her energy, humor and voice, often using props and talking to audience members, tossing us candy or walking up and down the aisles with a plate of cookies.
Accompanying her on piano is the musically talented Cody Bianchi, dressed as an elf and mostly silent, making us laugh with subtle facial expressions to convey his thoughts and feelings.
His own modernist and morose “holiday” composition is well worth the price of admission, with Libby singing numbers (“12,” “55”) in different tones almost operatically as Cody lays himself on the piano keys at one point to get the right sound.
“Mrs. Christmas” is a different kind of Christmas story, textured and layered with nostalgia, not just of Christmas songs but family memories, which in a way is what we’re all made of, even if we don’t share the woman’s Norwegian roots. How do our own family traditions make us who we are, even if we resisted them growing up, and what do we lose as those rituals perhaps inevitably fade over time?
The play is billed for adults and older teens who may have that larger perspective, especially if one is old enough to have had a parent or grandparent suffer or pass away. Though you may wonder at first where the story is going while enjoying the music, you’ll be fully drawn in by the end, feeling the spirit that the woman has inherited from her mother — and what part of that legacy she’ll pass on to the future.
“Mrs. Christmas” runs Dec. 5 to 21 at the Aurora Theater, 4412 E. Village Rd., Long Beach, with shows Mondays and Fridays at 7 p.m., Saturdays at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m., and Sundays at 2 p.m. For tickets, visit AuroraTheater.com. Free parking is available in a lot behind the theater. Run time is 90 minutes with no intermission.