The Santaland Diaries/ The Worst Holiday Pageant Ever

David Sedaris’s wry and reliably funny tale of his soul-flattening job as a Macy’s Christmas elf has become a holiday tradition in its own right, taking its place in a sardonic sub-pantheon of Santa tales that includes A Charlie Brown Christmas and Jean Shepherd’s A Christmas Story. After gaining fame in monologue form on NPR in the mid-nineties, Sedaris’ story has taken small theaters by storm, and with each new December gets staged by what seems like eighty dozen companies. Locally, that happy duty falls to Theater Limina, who last we saw this October doing Harold Pinter’s backwards bit of breakup bathos, Betrayal. Santaland shares the BLB stage this month with the equally irreverent holiday show from local thesps Craig Johnson, David Mann, Joseph Scrimshaw, and Sarah Gioia, whose Fringe Festival comedy The Worst Show in the Fringe was comical and snarky and smart and totally failed to live up to its name. (And you’ll forgive us if we give a small holler about Rake columnist Colleen Kruse’s Christmas Overeasy, Thursdays this month at BLB.)
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