If you, a Broadway-going parent, have already worked through (or been priced out of) The Lion King and Aladdin, and are facing an age range too young (or antsy) for Cursed Child, Wicked, or Back to the Future but still want to see something fly through the air, Elf: The Musical  is back. The show, in its third November-to-January engagement, has touched down at the Marriott Marquis to superserve a niche that’s specific but, judging by the sizable crowd and highly audible infant at my performance, definitely not unprofitable. It’s an opportunity to spend Yuletide at a production with the primary goal of being as palatable and inoffensive as possible. The aim of conveying an actual idea in musical form is secondary.
This Elf comes to us from London (maybe an early warning sign, musicalwise), where its director Philip Wm. McKinley has stripped things down to their most basic, though not in any avant-garde fashion. Tim Goodchild’s rather thin set pieces are usually overshadowed, yet again, by a giant screen (the videos are by Ian William Galloway), giving you that sinking feeling of watching people try to act in front of a product display at Best Buy—a sensation that’s unfortunately become Marquis Theatre house style. Liam Steel’s choreography gestures toward pizzazz, with lifts and cartwheels and even a bit of tap, but it never overcomes the bareness of the blocking.
The same goes for the cast members, who are generally working hard and making little headway. As our hero Buddy the Elf—a human man raised on the North Pole, looking for his birth father in New York City, in case you’re unfamiliar with the 2003 film—Mean Girls and Shucked’s Grey Henson is zagging toward fey whimsicality where Will Ferrell played something closer to an unbridled id. Henson’s a great fit for the role, with a clear tenor, a game sense of physical comedy, and good six inches on most of his castmates, even when they’re not kneeling on kneepads pretending to be elves. But I feel for anyone who has to run in place on a bare stage while pretending to traverse the Lincoln Tunnel. Many of his co-stars perform with a similar level of commitment that edges toward mania: Kayla Davion’s love interest belts her one big number so hard it’s like she’s trying to test if people can hear her outside the theater. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Sean Astin does low-key double duty as Santa and an intimidating publishing boss (as if the industry still supports those). He sings and dances as little as possible, and gets an appreciative coo of recognition from the audience when he tells a joke about Hobbits. I guess I respect the m.o.
But the odd thing about the Elf: the Musical, as my predecessor Scott Brown noted during its first at-bat in 2010, is that the show itself is two steps more ambitious than it needs to be. The 90-minute movie executes its premise at such a breakneck pace that you have no space to ask follow-up questions about lore. (I have to admit that I don’t love the movie, although I respect its ability to hit a punchline and move on fast, an art that’s dying alongside the studio comedy.) The musical, with its book by the pedigreed pair of Annie’s Thomas Meehan and The Drowsy Chaperone’s Bob Martin, stretches the story to two and a half hours. There are reasonable trims and rewrites: Buddy no longer creeps on his love interest as she showers, and he doesn’t mistake a man with dwarfism for an actual elf. But they also add a bunch of material that’s well-crafted filler. The recurring presence of a mall Santa (the one Buddy claims sits on a throne of lies), for instance, eventually leads to an Act Two curtain-raiser where he and a bunch of Jewish Santas do a Fiddler bit at a Chinese restaurant. There and elsewhere, the songs punch above the weight necessary for Christmas fluff, but most fail to clear the bar of justifying their presence in an already padded runtime. Chad Beguelin’s lyrics are witty—who would think of inserting a Rock of Gibraltar rhyme into an “I love my dad†number?—while Matthew Sklar’s melodies resemble skip tracks on a holiday jazz pop album you already have half-memorized. Elf isn’t about anything much other than, I guess, general niceness and that more people need to believe in Santa so his sleigh can fly. That’s a thin bough on which to hang a lot of better-than-necessary tinsel. You get the impression everyone involved would be better served applying their talent to a worthier premise (Martin, Sklar and Beguelin did, eventually, with The Prom).
If there are occasional glimmers that Elf has more going on than meets the eye, this production has done its best to convince you to grow up and stop believing in anything less than cold commercial logic. The show ends with its own flight of the DeLorean, this time with Santa’s sleigh and a ton of foam snow shot directly toward your seats. If it achieves a sense of spectacle, it’s only by way of brute force. I had to wipe a lot of crud off my glasses frames.
Elf is at the Marquis Theatre.