Here’s another reason to treasure the festive year-end holidays: Christine Pedi’s now-traditional Christmas show.  An amalgamation of cabaret show, house party and stand-up comedy performance, the versatile entertainer keeps the show moving on overdrive with songs, patter, parodies and audience participation.  There’s nary a dull moment between her opening, “A Holly Jolly Christmas” (immediately parodied into the Ebenezer Scrooge and Grinch law firm’s demand she stop singing it), to the evening’s wind-up of the entire audience joining in on “White Christmas.”

There can’t be many cabaret performers busier than Pedi.  She hosts a satellite radio show six days a week and was concurrently playing in the off-Broadway NEWSical the Musical during the seven-performance Snow Bizness cabaret engagement at the Laurie Beechman Theatre.  More to the point, there can’t be many cabaret performers as effective at caricaturing well-known other performers as is she.  In one song alone, the English carol “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” Pedi delivered each of the days sung as a different performer might, from Bette Davis, Carol Channing and Audrey Hepburn, to Angela Lansbury, Barbra Streisand and Elaine Stritch.  She’s got a razor-sharp eye for what characterizes someone’s singing, delivery and body language, tailoring them for laughs with her equally sharp, somewhat jaundiced, wit.

Pedi’s busy schedule may have been responsible for her occasional slightly raspy voice, but that did little to diminish the fun, and success, of her show.  A Forbidden Broadway veteran, she’s never been better.  Matthew Ward was Snow Bizness‘s adaptable musical director, Bret Scheinfeld technical director.

Christmas is over, but there’s still a chance to catch the show, and much of the whimsy is all the morewelcome to counter some of the conventional and saccharine Christmas shows we’ve just been through.  It plays one more time on Wednesday, December 30.

Peter Leavy
Cabaret Scenes
December 29, 2009
www.cabaretscenes.org