What is it about Christmas movies that we can’t seem to get enough of? The inevitable happy endings, no matter how high stakes the conflict; the coziness, symbolized by ubiquitous mugs of hot cocoa and shimmering decor; the flawed characters who transform for the better, are perhaps a start.
“A Very Kalamazoo Christmas” at Farmers Alley Theatre has all of these in spades but in live theatre form that localizes the story with familiar names, places, and references, as well as a couple of surprise celebrity cameos. It’s a live Hallmark movie parody that offers some very silly holiday entertainment.
Written by Michigan playwright Robert Hawlmark (nom de plume for John Lepard, cofounder of Williamston Theatre, where a variation of the play premiered in 2022), the story focuses on Kalamazoo native Felice, a Christmas-hating, career-driven woman, who’s striving to become a Project Director at Banks Enterprises in “The Big City of Battle Creek” to the exclusion of most everything else in her life, most vexingly her fiancé’s proposal and trip to Cancun as well as her schnapps-loving widowed mother’s pleas for her to come home for Christmas…