Sunday night at the Redwood Theatre featured Opera Revue’s antidote to Christmas shows, Bach Humbug!  As a card carrying Grinch I could scarcely fail to attend.  Plus the beer is good at the Redwood.  So what did we get?

It was the regular OR gang; Danie Friesen, Alexander Hajek and Claire Elise Harris.  There were no acrobats, burlesque performers or superstar opera ringers but there was a proper piano; a Bösendorfer, no less.  It was a pretty effective mix  of regular seasonal fare like O Holy Night, pieces that might masquerade as seasonal like Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, perennial favourites like Gounod’s Ave Maria and parodies old and new.

I rather liked Frederick Silver’s The Twelve Days After Christmas which slaughtered almost as many birds as Larry the Cat’s version.  And who could not appreciate a piece of Canadiana like the Ed and Doug McKenzie version of The Twelve Days of Christmas.  There was a food bank parody of Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire that you can hear on CTV’s Your Morning on Christmas Eve.  Appropriately a significant collection of cash and foodstuffs was made for Daily Bread.

Newer parodies included Surabaya Santa in which Mrs. Claus laments her perpetually absent spouse and of course there was a grinch; Alex in fact, whose splendid costume was matched only by Claire’s reindeer costume.  I think Opera Revue are probably on Santa’s nice list.