I’ll admit that I saw the movie Elf for the first time only a few days ago. Up until then, the trailer and snippets I’d catch when changing the channel in December were enough for me. Its star, Will Farrell, like his contemporary Adam Sandler, for many decades served as a reason for me to avoid, rather than attend, any movie with either one of them in the cast, and even their early appearances on Saturday Night Live struck me as desperate straining to please rather than effective comic delivery. But I’ll admit that I’ve been unfair to Will Farrell. (I still haven’t boarded the Adam Sandler train.) I enjoyed Farrell’s performance in Spirited on Netflix, and when I watched him as Buddy the Elf a few days ago, I realized that he wasn’t desperate, but generous. He was willing to do whatever it took to make the movie work. And, perhaps most strangely of all, the reason I watched Elf in the first place was that on the night before, I had seen the musical version onstage (also for the first time) at our local Mill Mountain Theatre here in Roanoke. Elf the Musical turned out to be a delight, not because the score was especially hummable, not because the book was especially witty, but because the cast was uniformly excellent, and the man playing the Will Farrell part of Buddy, Jarrett Jay Yoder, turned in one of the finest performances I’ve ever seen on the Mill Mountain stage. And I’ve been attending their shows ever since I was twelve years old, when in the summer of 1964 the Mill Mountain Playhouse opened its first season.
I had seen Yoder turn in a solid performance as Tommy in Mill Mountain’s Jersey Boys earlier in the season, but though I should have known better, I mistook his tough-guy persona as a measure of his acting range. Sorry, Mr. Yoder; that was both amateurish and unfair on my part. From the moment he appeared in Elf the Musical, Yoder was unrecognizable to anyone who had seen him as Tommy. From the outset and throughout the entire two-and-a-half hours of the show he delivered a fully committed, brilliantly specific, courageous, intelligent, high energy, flat-out dazzling incarnation of Buddy the Elf. I’ve directed over 30 plays and musicals, and I expect high standards in professional theater. But when somebody gets cast in a role this goofy, the actor may be tempted to succumb to self-consciousness and play the part with a winking acknowledgment of how silly his character is. Yoder entirely and bravely avoids that trap and gives us a Buddy who is utterly innocent of meanness, selfishness, irony, or guile. The result is that Buddy the character charms the audience with his goodness. Simultaneously Yoder the actor charms us with his willingness to go as far as necessary to demonstrate that all of us have an innate elfin goodness that, if we allow it to emerge, is capable indeed of saving Christmas year after year.
I already mentioned that the cast supporting Yoder was uniformly terrific, and here I’ll cite only a few by name. Rebecca Lee Lerman and Calan Johnson as Buddy’s stepmother and stepbrother respectively have fine chemistry, particularly in their duet in which they compose a wistful letter to Santa Claus. Joining them as Buddy’s father is Jeffrey McGullion, who rises to the tough challenge of having to pull off a Scrooge-level transformation in the course of the show. Credit of course must go to Hector Flores, the director, and to Joe Barros, assistant director and choreographer, for finding the ways into these characters and providing the dance steps to reveal them. I thought of all the elements of the Mill Mountain show as I watched the movie on the night after I left the theater, and I realized that Yoder’s performance on the stage showed me how wrong I’d been about Will Farrell. Buddy calls for an actor willing to banish all traces of worldly wisdom from his character, and that’s a feat both difficult and magnanimous. Pulling it off is a gift to the audience, and both Farrell and Yoder have delivered spectacularly.