PhotobucketThere’s a moment very early on in An Adagio Christ­mas when the whole theatre gasped in uni­son, and both our daugh­ters stood up in shock. The moment passed, the shock faded, but they nev­er quite settled back past the edges of their seats. Like the rest of us, from then on they were hooked.

An Adagio Christ­mas is a retuned-for-Christ­mas ver­sion of the earli­er Down­stage pro­duc­tion of the same name; a series of loosely linked vign­ettes whose per­form­ances encom­pass vari­ous cir­cus skills as well as music, singing, dan­cing, and com­edy.

While there’s little nar­rat­ive in the usu­al sense, there’s plenty to watch and mar­vel at. Any­one who enjoyed cir­cus per­form­ances like Grav­ity and Oth­er Myths will find much here to enjoy. Row­an Hey­don White and Mason West are both noth­ing short of amaz­ing per­formers (our young­est’s descrip­tion of Mason West: “the man with the cap was very strong and clev­er”).

There’s also plenty to laugh at (though there might well be some slightly dif­fer­ent joke selec­tions for the mat­in­ees). We all enjoyed the comed­ic ele­ments, with Angela Green’s vent­ri­lo­quist’s dummy and Jenny MacAr­thur’s baller­ina both the sub­ject of later hys­ter­ic­al shared remem­ber­ings.

The finale was beau­ti­fully sung by Asalemo Tofete, and the per­form­ance ended with a won­der­fully Christ­massy touch that our eld­est liked so much she later rep­lic­ated it for her­self.

An Adagio at Christ­mas is a great night out for the whole family—whatever and whomever you con­sider your fam­ily to be. We’ve been recom­mend­ing it to every­one we know.

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