Christmas, that most traditional of holidays, got a pleasant, irreverent kick in the … er, pants from Sharon McNight, that most unconventional of cabaret divas, at Tom Rolla’s Gardenia just days before the holiday.

In a show titled, Twisted Christmas: An Orthodox Druid’s View of the Holiday Season, McNight was her strong, irreverent, ballsy self — a consummate performer with a powerful voice and strong, straightforward delivery who is completely in her element on stage performing a heavy mix of self-described “weirdo stuff.”

Among that stuff was a self-penned salute to airport security entitled, “I’m Dreaming of a White Christian”;  “Rudolph the Disco Reindeer”; and “California Christmas,” a Brad Craig song about the virtues of a holiday season filled with sun and convertibles “where the only Santa I want to know is the Santa Ana wind.”

She also performed an audience-participation number called “Santa Lost a Ho” — that’s “ho” as in “ho, ho, ho,” though no one singing along was actually thinking of a missing syllable from Santa’s hearty laugh.

McNight saluted the holidays in a slightly more traditional fashion, singing one genuine Christmas carol, “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” albeit to the tune of The Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun;” and rendering a portion of Tchaikowsky’s “Nutcracker Suite” to special lyrics by Brad Craig.  But then it was back to form with a nod to Chanukah with “Kreplach Roasting on an Open Fire.”

She also sang a somewhat demented version of “The Teddy Bears Picnic” (by John Walter Bratton and Jimmy Kennedy) to a hand puppet (with a second verse that made a picnic among a group of bears sound verrrrry scary); added a genuine yodel to Tex Ritter’s “Singing Christmas Carols by the Old Corral”; and performed Don Gardner’s “All I Want for Christmas,” in a short frilly dress with a large red ribbon in her hair and her two front teeth blacked out — accompanied throughout by Richard Berent on piano.

McNight did get serious late in the show, reaching back to 1854 for a Stephen Foster lament called “Hard Times” – not really a Christmas song but one that asks, “Oh, hard times, come again no more,” which McNight said seemed appropriate in the current economic environment.

Sharon McNight is a genuine hoot, and from the audience response, its collective Christmas wish was clearly for Sharon McNight to come again lots more.

Elliot Zwiebach
Cabaret Scenes
December 20, 2008
www.cabaretscenes.org