Krampus: A New Musical, Straight Edge Theatre at Workshop West. Photo by David Son.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

It’s beginning to look a lot…. Two original, bona fide homegrown holiday musicals return this week to the stage — both unconventional, both expanded and enhanced from their 2023 editions — to deck the halls. Well, two different halls, and for that matter two different definitions of deck.

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[Grindstone’s Die Harsh, opening Friday at the Orange Hub, isn’t exactly a case of donning now our gay apparel. Artistic director and co-creator (with Simon Abbott) Byron Martin talks to 12thnight.ca about the musical comedy merger of action thriller and A Christmas Carol here.]

Straight Edge Theatre’s Krampus: A New Musical might have the oddest Yuletide provenance of all. For one thing, the macabre Christmas musical comedy by Stephen Allred and Seth Gilfillan premiered during a midsummer heat wave, at the Fringe. I remember seeing it at noon on a sultry August day, when it would have been possible to dream of a white Christmas as a purely speculative activity.

Krampus: A New Musical, Straight Edge Theatre at Workshop West. Photo by David Son.

“Actually I thought it was perfect for Fringe,” laughs Gilfillan. “We’ve been doing shows that are progressively more crazy and kooky anyhow.” Says Allred, “and you’re not facing much competition from other Christmas shows in August.” The Straight Edge production directed by Allred returns Friday, this time in “fuller form,” as part of the Workshop West Playwrights Theatre season at the Gateway (it’s WWPT’s first Christmas show).

And with it, a dark and funny take on those old Christmas heartwarmers about family, and being home for Christmas, and togetherness and goodwill and all that. Yup, for this the season of family dysfunction, a beady-eyed musical that sees behind the twinkling facade. We meet Rhonette (Amanda Neufeld), the fiercely competitive matriarch, whose Christmas decor cannot be bested. We meet cowed, mild-mannered dad (Jacob Holloway) and the offspring Billy and Tilly. Something dark and sinister is lurking. What could it be? (hey, this is a preview; you have to see Krampus to find out).   

Allred and Gilfillan, partners in life and in theatre, belong to an exclusive subset of busy musical-writing teams. The former is a dentist (he graduated in 2015); the latter is a pharmacist. If you want to talk to them, try 8 a.m. on Sunday morning. And they “crossed paths” nine years ago, not over a prescription (or, god forbid, a root canal), but when Gilfillan was watching an Allred Fringe show.    

Allred and his Straight Edge co-founder Bethany Hughes have been doing shows under that banner since 2014, with a history that starts with Bat Boy and includes (Adam Gwon’s) Ordinary Days and Evil Dead The Musical, before the Straight Edge originals began. That was with Cult Cycle in 2018 — by Allred, Hughes and Gilfillan, with music by Daniel Belland — which uncovers a murderous cult waiting for resisters to fat-burning fitness culture.

Allred grew up singing in church choirs, at school, in bands, in theatre. His creative muse always involves musical theatre, he says. “As a performer myself, I’m drawn to the vocal aspect of it.” Gilfillan says, modestly, “I like writing stories; I write music; I had no performing training.” He grew up in Grande Prairie, with three brothers “who were into hunting and football…. I sang in the shower when no one was home.”

During COVID, “we wrote and wrote and wrote,” says Gilfillan. Amazingly, his first time onstage was in their 2022 musical comedy Conjoined, which took sibling rivalry to a new and lethal level. The proposition is hilariously dark, with tricky stagecraft for a musical: a pair of conjoined twins, one of whom seethes with murderous resentment over his smug, bossy over-achiever other half.

Together, as you will glean, Allred and Gilfillan gravitate toward dark comedy and camp. “Kooky and irreverent” are their bywords. In trips to see Broadway musicals, they single out shows like Beetlejuice or The Book of Mormon.

It was during the run of Conjoined at the Fringe that the inspiration for Krampus occurred. Allred credits Gilfillan with the what-if? idea. “We had a burst, and wrote the entire play and some of the music,” all at one go.

And now, as Straight Edge’s production joins the Workshop West mainstage season, the pair has revisited the piece. The same cast, the same musical forces (the Edmonton Pops Orchestra led by Michael Clark) return for the remount. “It’s still a quick show,” says Allred. “But it’s two acts now, a bit fuller, we’ve managed to have some of our favourite songs…. It was a chance to (amplify) an idea, a thought, or a character trait we hadn’t fully explored. And they’ve turned out to be some of the most exciting moments.”

“We thought about what the show needed — a few plot points or character traits that hadn’t been fully realized, or even just beats within the arc.” Says Gilfillan “we didn’t want to just add for the sake of adding stuff. But there are two new songs (one for the formidable mom in Act I) , and a reprise.”

Under these Krampus circumstances, I know you’re wondering how Allred and Gilfillan feel about Christmas themselves. Surprise! They love it. “We like to make Christmas a long as possible,” says Allred cheerfully. First one Christmas, then another; we travel between the households of our two families…. And we always create Advent calendars for each other.”

PREVIEW

Krampus: a new musical

Theatre: Straight Edge Theatre at Workshop West Playwrights Theatre

Created by: Seth Gilfillan and Stephen Allred (book and music), Michael Clark (orchestrations)

Directed by: Stephen Allred

Starring: Damon Pitcher, Victoria Suen, Amanda Neufeld, Jacob Holloway, Nicole English, Seth Gilfillan

Music by: Edmonton Pops Orchestra

Where: Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.

Running: Friday through Dec. 22

Tickets: workshopwest.org (all tickets pay-what-you-will).