ARTS

freeFall’s ‘The Night Before’ Gives Gift of Cheer

It’s the Play You Didn’t Know You Needed

By Jeff Donnelly

Local radio stations switched to around-the-clock holiday tunes the day after Halloween this year, which either means radio has just given up or listeners were eager for some cheer at the end of a dreary year. It’s probably a little of both, but who’s really complaining? Argue all you want about the reason for the season, but freeFall knows that music makes the holidays, so they cut to the chase and built a show around it. freeFall’s outreach and marketing director Matthew McGee drives the sleigh for the company’s latest offering, writing and directing “The Night Before” as an alternative to the standard holiday fare onstage this time of year. It’s as if the brain trust over at freeFall plotted the 2021 season and when they got to December, they asked: Is what’s expected the same as what people want? I never know what to expect when I see a show at freeFall, and it took about 10 minutes and a couple of numbers for me to realize they’d taken a favorite part of the holidays – the music – and juiced it with a quartet of jolly good voices and a stocking full of classic tunes – both originals and mashups created by the company’s musical director Michael Raabe.

“The Night Before” does have a plot, one that involves a holiday gathering of close friends on the night before the night before Christmas, but these four characters can barely get through a conversation without breaking into song. That’s a good thing for us, though: Sara DelBeato, James David Larsen, Hillary Lewis and Raabe himself all play joyfully kooky characters as the friends, but the music is the gift, and they deliver.

Music makes the holidays, and freeFall Theatre capitalizes on this with its holiday production of “The Night Before.”

Joseph Michael Kenneth

Plenty of standards make an appearance in medleys crafted for the show, and some stand on their own just fine (because why mess with “Silent Night” when you’ve got Hillary Lewis to sing it?) And it doesn’t get more right-on than when James David Larsen busts out his guitar for “Blue Christmas” after getting ditched by his Tinder date. Other tunes inject Christmas cheer where you never thought to put it, like in Raabe’s “A Very Sondheim Christmas” mega medley, where Raabe ingeniously re-purposes a slew of familiar Sondheim tunes with seasonal lyrics.

If there’s a Spotify playlist with the original cast recording of “The Night Before”, freeFall should make it public and send the link. Nat King Cole will never wear out his welcome, but the soundtrack of our lives could always use some freshening up. Mc- Gee and company achieve that task in delightful and surprising ways, never losing sight of all that’s merry and bright about this time of year.

freeFall Theatre, 6099 Central Ave., St. Petersburg. Through Dec. 24: Wed.-Sun., 2 p.m. & 7 p.m. $45- $55. 727-498-5205; freefalltheatre. com.