THEATER REVIEW: "Christmas Smackdown" ★★★ Through Dec. 22 in the Del Close Theater at i.O., 3541 N. Clark St.; Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes; Tickets: $14 at 773-880-0199 or chicago.ioimprov.com
“Christmas Smackdown” begins with a song about a suicide hotel — in which the big question is whether to hang the mistletoe or oneself — and ends with a little riff on the joys of cannibalism. Apart from that, it's quite the cheery holiday show.
This fully scripted, four-person musical revue at i.O. is the work of the Los Angeles-based Mark Nutter and Cynthia Carle, who not only wrote all the music and lyrics, but jetted into town to direct the performing quartet of Lyndsay Hailey, Tim Soszko, Molly Todd and David Henry Wrigley. Nutter is the creator of “The Bicycle Men,” one of the funniest shows ever to grace i.O. (at least when I was in a seat) and a cultish hit in New York and London.
Nutter is about the closest current thing I know to the '60s satirist Tom Lehrer. He writes these zany, old-fashioned comic songs with fiendishly clever lyrics and deviously absurd and gently anarchic sensibilities. One of his solo albums is titled “Twisted Songs for Twisted Sophisticates,” and if you add the word “Christmas” in there somewhere, you'll get a pretty apt description of the nature of the merriment here.
The “Christmas Smackdown” has been a fixture in North Hollywood for the last few years under the title “The Christmas Suicide Hotel”; this year marks its first Chicago appearance. It's not one of those loud and campy, anti-holiday takedowns nor any kind of juvenile romp — Nutter and Carle are no 20-somethings — but rather a slightly warped version of one of those old TV holiday specials. “The Dirt on the Minstrel,” a faux-medieval ditty, would have been perfectly at home on “The Tonight Show's” Mighty Carson Art Players. (Nutter, incidentally, has served his years in writing for television.)
There are many digressions into the absurd. One of the 20 songs, titled “Lotion Samples,” is dedicated entirely to the small bottles of toiletries that are invariably, assuming your life is as sad as mine, the most exciting things in your hotel room. It is apropos of nothing, of course, and thus all the funnier.
Another highlight is “The Sky Mall Song,” an ode to the time-killing cornucopia of high-tech, wholly useless goodies whose delights can be vicariously sampled at 30,000 feet from the seat pocket in front of you. But I think I laughed hardest at “Present,” Hailey's hilarious solo that mocks familial gift-giving: “Dearest Brother, how do you do./ Take this gift/ it's nothing special/ just like you.” Or, “Little Andrew, you precious boy./ I thought I'd save you time/ so here's a broken toy.”
Or — and this was my personal favorite — “Daddy, Here's a DVD/ of your colonoscopy/ good luck getting that exchanged.”
The terrific Hailey also has a very amusing song called “Angels,” which suggests that guardian angels are assigned rather like seats on an airplane. The elite fliers get the good ones; the rest of us get the clapped-out wings in our faces. I could go on through the “Severed Swedish Heads” (the very picture should help with your day) or the songs that poke fun at fundamentalism. But such pleasures await in real, seasonal time. Should one be reeling from a relationship breakup, the climactic song “All the Best” totally nails the way the horrors of past betrayals and breakups seem to come to the psychological fore at Christmas, as if they were Rudolph's nose rushing through the fog.
The production values are, as one might expect at this venue, minimal, although Lisa McQueen tinkles a mean set of keys. But there's a bar in the back, a warm atmosphere, four amusing and quite decent singers on the stage, and a mature feast of funny holiday songs. All for $14.