Review: TROUBIES’ HOME ALONE-LY HEARTS CLUB BAND at Colony Theater

Wigs…check. Oversize props…CHECK, Band…check again. Video… yup. Winter Warlock…c’mon! Cinematic nostalgia? Innovation? Needle-sharp spoofery?

Yeah, well, maybe next year, phlegm wad!

Sorry, didn’t mean to let a little skosh of McCallister sibling nastiness slip into a theater review.  How very mean-spirited of me! We’re supposed to be talking about a holiday show, right?

OK, then, barf bag! (Damn it!)! As has been the case for every holiday season for the past two decades, the irreverent Troubadour Theater is making merry and light, naughty and nice with a Christmas (or holiday-adjacent) tale. A movie or TV special gets retold using the songs of a well-known band or bands. Here, it’s the story of 1990’s HOME ALONE laced with several tracks - doctored, naturally - from The Beatles’ 1967 album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Hence TROUBIES' HOME ALONE-LY HEARTS CLUB BAND, and yes, that title track will likely ear-worm you by evening’s end.  

Given the properties in play, it feels like a property that should pack the seats. There can be no shortage of Beatles fans, of HOME ALONE devotees (many of a certain age, probably) and of holiday playgoers. And coming up on 30 years of performing the company’s signature brand of ribaldry in the SoCal area and 20 years of holiday shows, the Troubies have no difficulty putting butts in seats whatever the season, whether they’re playing fast and loose with yuletide tales or the work of Shakespeare. The mixture this time around is entertaining if not the company’s A-game. HOME ALONE-LY HEARTS CLUB, while providing plenty of laughs, feels thin…thin on merriment, thin on satirical edge and certainly thin on script.

Not thin on music. Nobody ever needs an excuse to break into numbers like “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” “When I’m Sixty-Four,” “Good Morning Good Morning,” “Getting Better”…and the list goes on. Director Matt Walker and the Troubies tinker with the chosen numbers placing them dexterously into the HOME ALONE plot. Music Director Ryan Whyman and the five-member Troubadorchestra give it plenty of pep. Troubie faithful may miss longtime company member Lisa Valenzuela leading the pre-curtain holiday songs.  

But back to the play. The plot follows the events of HOME ALONE with the McCallister family – father, mother, uncle, aunt and five kids leaving Chicago to spend Christmas in Paris only to accidentally leave 8-year-old Kevin behind. Not only is the kid alone in the house, he has to fend off Harry and Marvin, a couple of doofusy would-be cat burglars. Which, sharp and resourceful little urchin that he is, Kevin does. All the while, Kevin’s mom, Kate, is trying desperately to get back to her boy.

Now, when you’ve been abandoned, you are indeed, home alone, so you probably don’t really “get by with the help of your friends." Not when you’re Kevin Frickin’ McCallister. That is, if memory serves, the point of the stupid movie. The kid is basically John McClane and Inspector Gadget in holiday pjs. Who really needs any assistance when you’re that smart, you’ve got plenty of cool functional toys to weaponize and the baddies trying to scramble your eggs share half a brain between them?

This is not to suggest that Walker, who plays young Kevin in HOME ALONE-LY HEARTS CLUB, couldn't use some help from his friends, but not so very many. On stage, our central players are Kevin, his mom (played by Beth Kennedy), the crooks (Rick Batalla and Phillip McNiven) followed by a bunch of people doing cameos. Sometimes it’s a full-on musical number; other times, a set piece. Or the action just breaks for no real purpose, just for laughs. We get an extended flashback to a holiday show from the Troubies’ recent past and plenty of vamping, sometimes with members of the audience the more goofily dressed, the better.

HOME ALONE-LY HEARTS CLUB has maybe 80 minutes of performance split over two acts. Tricky as it would probably be to put all those complicated villain-punishing hijinks live on stage, the Troubies mostly gloss over them. The climax is accomplished through a montage. Lighting by Bo Tindell, Robert Arturo Ramirez’s sound effects and Rick Batalla’s video help carry the technical needs.

Walker and Kennedy are plenty adept at playing things broad and straight, and the production gives them rope to do both. These two Troubie lifers work their usual comic bags of tricks, but they also wring a sentimental “awwww!” out of the mother-son reunion. As he has done in many previous shows, Batalla (playing the Joe Pesci part) makes for a very funny and campy villain, and Suzanne Jolie Narbonne – also the production’s costume and wig designer and co-choreographer – is kept plenty busy as a Kevin stand-in, ensemble member and as a grocery checkout gal who inspires a “lovely” number.

As previously noted, the company will be back this summer with the return of OEDIPUS THE KING, MAMA. The Troubies have packed some serious clowning into their three decades. They may not be "getting better all the time," but  like clockwork, the holiday laughs keep coming. 

TROUBIES' HOME ALONE-LY HEART CLUB BAND plays through December 22 at 555 N. Third St., Burbank

Photo of Beth Kennedy, Benji Kaufman and the band by Ashley Erikson.

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