This is a return engagement for the ultra campy en travestie charade that is once again setting its sights on the presumably responsive gay set. That it will surely fail to humor anyone else on the planet is a major drawback. Perhaps the show's San Francisco admirers, during its six-season run in the 90s, saw something special in this audaciously costumed but mostly poorly-acted parade of famous film stars. The premise, however, has potential. It is 1944 and long-time MGM star Joan Crawford (Joey Arias) has just gotten the ax, or should I say wire-hanger sendoff from studio boss Louis B. Mayer. While awaiting her screen test result for "Mildred Pierce," from Warner Bros., and to keep her spirits as well as her broad shoulders up, she has arranged for a Christmastime radio broadcast to be aired directly from her Brentwood home. Here, Crawford is not only distracted and made increasingly distraught by Christina and Christopher, her misbehaving children, but by a constant stream of movie stars who enter her home mistaking it for the home of neighbor Gary Cooper, who is throwing a party.
With such easy to caricature types in attendance and all eager to sing a song over the airwaves, it is hard to imagine more pitifully off-the-mark considerations of Carmen Miranda, the Andrew Sisters, Ethel Merman and Mae West. An outrageously overweight and crude Shirley Temple is notably unfunny. The show's best performer and its only distaff member, Connie Champagne, does a wacky version of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" as a quivering-voiced Katherine Hepburn all dolled up as Eleanor of Acquitaine. Champagne, also as Judy Garland, strikes an unexpected note of poignancy with a lovely rendition of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." The rest of cast, including Arias, as the stone-faced Crawford, is better suited to modeling the splendiferous costumes, wigs, and hats designed by Chris March, than they are to mimicking or capturing the personalities and quirks of their characters. The lackluster script relies too much on familiar lines from old movies and on our willingness to be satisfied with stunning costumes instead of smart dialogue.
The arrival of Swanson as Norma Desmond might have brought some needed wit had she arrived with a dead monkey and left with a smoking gun. As it is, we are left wondering how so many of filmdom's elite could end up at the wrong address.
