Fresh holiday season fare is always welcome each year and it is not surprising that the new musical A Catfish Christmas, Immigrant’s Daughter Theatre’s latest creative venture produced with ThreePenny Theatre Company, is a jolly delight but is also an earthy and gutsy ride.
Written by Ariana Broumas Farber with music and lyrics by Spencer Ford and directed by Jonah Kirkhart Ericson, A Catfish Christmas takes a smart exit from the season’s interstate highway of feel-good sentimentality and showcases an epiphany suggesting that redemption often comes with hard lessons even when a bit of Christmas magic works its way into the narrative.
Set in Columbus, Ohio, one of college football’s most famous citadels, the story revolves around Stephanie Westerburg, who prefers the name of Kiki ‘O.K.’ Kalayka. At 40, Kiki (played fantastically with bursts of zeal and earnest emotion by Brenda Hattingh Peatross), who was born and raised Jewish, is having a midlife crisis. She imagines herself as a Hawaiian – her escape from the realities of unfulfilled goals that have confounded her life. Always falling short of completing just about anything, she has tried making her name as a playwright and musician, albeit more often half-hearted than committed to putting in the elbow grease to realize her creative dream. When she is not running her singing telegram business (which hardly sustains her livelihood), she is set on writing a musical based on a Netflix true story about a Hawaiian football player whose rise to sports stardom was cut short when he was duped in an embarrassing catfishing scandal.
In fact, many will easily recognize a parallel in the narrative to the real life story of Manti Te’o, an All-American linebacker who played at Notre Dame and was a 2012 finalist for the Heisman Trophy. Te’o’s story drew millions of supportive fans, when news spread that his grandmother and girlfriend had died within hours of each other, just before a critical game. But, when the story emerged that his online relationship was a hoax and there was no girlfriend who had died from leukemia, no one had prepared Te’o for the merciless public scrutiny he would face, even as he insisted that he initially did not know that he was a victim of catfishing.
Truly a smart stroke by the playwright in this snappy holiday play, Farber’s fictional recreation of the football player is Kimo ‘Sonny’ Akana, played by Tevita ‘Tino’ Inukiha’angana, a former football athlete who is making his acting debut in this production. Dressed in a Shaka Santa suit, he makes for an unconventional and memorable Santa in A Catfish Christmas.
Rounding out this wholly delightful chamber theater production are Tiffani DiGregorio, who digs impressively into the character of Rosie Gundersheimer, Stephanie’s roommate (who uses a wheelchair) and who has been her childhood friend since their days at Hebrew school, and Miles Broadhead, who pitches the right tone as Kyle Cornish, a man in his late thirties who lives with his grandmother in the same apartment building. Tender-hearted Kyle fancies Stephanie and even supports her Kiki persona. Of course, she is oblivious to his interest in her. Meanwhile, Kiki’s unsuccessful touch extends to the lack of luck she has on dating apps (ironically engaging in a bit of her own catfishing in the hopes of catching a Polynesian man built for football).
This is a sing-along musical and the ukulele-toting Kiki, who always wears kitschy versions of Hawaiian cultural garb regardless of how cold it is in central Ohio, steps onto the stage at the opening and belts out the opening song Christmas in the Sand. The lyrics are projected so that the audience can sing along, and suddenly the Alliance Theatre venue in the Utah Arts Alliance space at Trolley Square feels like a karaoke club: “We’ll lie in our hammocks at night/Drinking eggnog; we’ve got stars above for Christmas lights!/…Hang up all the stockings barefoot /where we’re walking /Wearing our leis/Sandy Castles over men made of snow/Under palm trees; we’ve got coconuts for mistletoe.”
Kiki has recruited Rosie and Kyle as ‘board members’ for kickstarting the financing of her musical, which barely has been written in any appreciable length or detail. Rosie is exasperated by her lifelong friend’s antipathy toward making any real progress. She believes that Stephanie [Rosie refuses to call her ‘Kiki’] should shelve dreams that are unrealistic and incapable of bringing in the money she needs for rent and living expenses. The comedy frequently bites and stings and the bullets are fired at will by both roommates against each other. Interspersed are more scenes with the audience singing along with Kiki. At times, one feels like cheering for Kiki’s tropical aspirations. Why suffer the holidays waiting for public transit on a gray, blustery, chilly day when we could be lounging beachside, surrounded by Kiki’s imagery of Hawai’i evoked in the lyrics of her songs?
Kyle’s soft-hearted spot for Kiki plays effectively against Rosie’s harsh edge of dealing with realities. Rosie sees her friend as hopelessly mired in delusions and when their pivotal argument occurs in the play, the exchange of words is brutal and unsparing. Rosie’s pointed criticism about Stephanie is justified but its bluntness also threatens to ruin permanently a lifelong friendship. Lacking judiciousness in her temperament, Kiki lashes out as well in defense, almost as ruthlessly and selfishly as Rosie.
A Catfish Christmas is an astute commentary on holiday traditions. The characters wax nostalgically about Hanukkah, menorahs and dreidels, as well as lighting candles at a midnight Lutheran church service on Christmas Eve. Meanwhile, Rosie, Kiki and Kyle are hardly joyful. The play muses on the all-too-familiar dysfunctional tradition of the holiday season set-to. Many celebrations in families and among friends are ruined by conflicts, arguments, disappointments, shortfalls, etc., as visions of a perfect holiday are eclipsed by toxic moods and feelings of intense wrath. Throw in a little alcohol and people are likely to not filter or edit their sentiments and grievances. Kimo’s appearance at a Columbus, Ohio bus stop is that magical Christmas Eve trope we look for in every holiday story as a glimpse of reconciliation becoming possible. Nevertheless, Kiki may be onto something that is very appealing: tanning barefoot on a sun-kissed beach in Hawai’i is a good idea, if it means escaping the tense dramas of the holidays.
The production continues through Dec. 15. The Dec. 14 evening performance will be followed by a Holiday Hukilau Fundraiser, as a fundraiser to support Immigrant’s Daughter Theatre’s trip with Lil Poppet Productions to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in the summer of 2025. For tickets and more information, see this link.