The Brooklyn Rail

The evening was as ragtag as it was a who’s who.

Theater luminaries—Pulitzer Prize winner Michael R. Jackson, Tony Award nominee Taylor Trensch, cabaret icon Natalie Walker—mingled with friends as they arrived. And nearby, Chex Mix mingled in plastic bowls.

A grab bag of snacks and artists made for an appropriate welcome to Nativity, a performance of high and low. Nativities have been staged for nearly a millennium, but never like Nativity: a deranged take on the events preceding a certain savior’s birth. What was he called again?

“I love the name Tanner,” Mary (Kim Blanck) told her gay bestie.

A musical pageant written by Patrick Lazour, Daniel Lazour, and Mark Sonnenblick, Nativity performed December 13 and 14 at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery. Or maybe it’s The Nativity: that article appears on the program but not the social media graphic. What writer likes titling their work? And what does it matter: an unofficial title plays to the homespun ethos of this hour-long show that was giving come-as-you-are.

And come the faithful did: this was (The) Nativity’s third-annual showing and the first year it played more than one evening. All tickets were sold at door, which opened an hour beforehand, and at the Saturday performance an audience of largely young artists arrived surprisingly early—and in droves. Producer Ryan Gedrich (who also baked sugar cookies, to compliment the Chex Mix) quickly set out another row of chairs toward the back of the nave.

A thirty dollar suggested donation benefited City Harvest and funded the all-you-can-drink wine, which added a festive, near bacchanalian, spirit to the performance. More pointedly, the wine invited the play to be something so few are: rowdy and rigorous.

Eschewing the formal hallmarks of the theatergoing experience—there were no assigned seats, no house manager, no box office; no director’s note, no director at all, no actor bios or (thank Christ) their “for more, follow me @MyInstagramHandle”—Nativity offered an organic return to what it might have been like to see plays in 1 BCE.

Not that those times were so comfy.

“I built this house!” Joseph (Jared Loftin) yelled during a spat.

“House?” Mary fired back.

That’s not the only drama: Mary’s pregnant. Keenly aware of the ridiculous cue lines musical theater composers use to lead into song, the Lazours and Sonnenblick gave the confused Virgin one of her own: “Get a hold of yourself, Mary!”

Here comes the “I Want” number. (The opener, “Christmas is for Miracles,” had the Lazours and Sonnenblick—also the show’s Nazarethian Chorus—attempt to conduct the audience in a contrapuntal blend of hymns, including a weirdly syncopated “Silent Night”; it didn’t work, and it was never meant to.) But in Mary’s number, the melody lands with grounded verses before an octave-jumping chorus that sits instinctually in Blanck’s voice. Less an “I Want,” this second song is more what its title tells: “I Guess That’s Just How it Goes.”

Listing the duties she’s already saddled with, Mary then sings, “But there’s a baby now … how did it get there?” In that ellipsis, the composers have wisely baked in a pause for laughter which, three years in row, gonged on cue.

This is Blanck’s first year as Mary; in 2023 and 2024, Olivia AbiAssi portrayed her, and, by the time the chorus came around yet again, AbiAssi’s singing of “I guess that’s just how it goes” had her tossing her hands up, turning around, and reciting her fate to the upstage wall. It was hilarious. Equally resigned, Blanck made her own choice, slowly turning her head and glaring at the Lazours and Sonnenblick, who, as her unsupportive backup singers, replied, “That’s just how it goes, Mary.”

In the same way community theater productions of A Christmas Carol may give each town’s septuagenarian a chance at Scrooge, (The) Nativity has seen actors cycle through roles, and it’s a joy to witness each’s unrestricted interpretations.

Jackson debuted as this year’s quippy narrator, and Trensch, last year’s Joseph, was now Andy, Mary’s dad’s gay lover (duh) who renovates homes upstate (sure) in a town called Bethlehem (dramaturgy!).

Actors sat off to the side, visible to the audience, augmenting an informal, communal experience; when Blanck exited after her solo, she sat beside Walker, who beamed at her with a wattage matched only by her pristine white costume.

Walker returned this year as the angel Gabriella, wailing atop a ladder decked with rainbow Christmas lights. Her operatic voice, a whipping tornado, heralded the news that convinced Joseph to stave off divorce. (In this retelling, she was seeking a Jeffrey, but so what? Tomayto, tomahto.)

Soon, another Nativity regular returned: Isaac Josephthal as the inconsequential drummer whose percussive talents are not the stuff of Juilliard. “The Little Drummer Boy” was popularized by the Trapps, and Josephthal is dressed like one, albeit more Berlin nightlife than Austrian morning. The song, and its character, has no historical basis, but this isn’t the Bible; it’s Nativity, so drum away on the dinked soup pot. (Next yuletide, a Le Creuset sponsorship? No, keep it small.)

A professional theater could adopt Nativity and make it a seasonal staple, but it is the unaffiliated musical’s no-frills approach that maintains its magic and—to go there—honors the humility of Jesus’s birth. Actors hold scripts, and these are songs written with a deep appreciation for ritual and stories’ unique potential to align the breath of a room, hold it, and then release it in stupid laughter.

“Did…,” Joseph sings, “you…” at the local bar, The Eleventh Commandment, “fuck my wife?”

Amidst the irreverence, a quiet heart emerges. The sleighbells pause for “Holy is Quotidian,” a midshow number Daniel Lazour sings about the less-popularized period between Jesus’s conception and birth. In those months, an otherwise-ordinary couple went about their days, breaking bread, enduring “the everyday beauty of the autumn rain, the everyday cruelty of the autumn rain.”

Again, the room’s breath unified, this time stilling, and it was the night’s overarching raucous energy that allowed for this contrast. This pageant, too, gets its Linus monologue, a zoomed-out moment of reflection.

As the year concludes, I’m reflecting on the live shows that have made this freelancer excited to leave his couch. It has certainly been for plays in traditional venues, but their social mores can make observing audiences—in the dark, abiding by decorum, seated in unmovable rows—less interesting. And I’ve grown hungrier to document not only the performers but how audiences, just as live, respond to them. They made the decision to leave their home, and how they gather, react, and breathe reminds me, as I spend more time online, why people seek experience off. This has helped me celebrate singular forms of gathering—singular in that shows I’ve covered sometimes happened once, often operating on the fringes. Such works can be scrappy or supported, but regardless they’ve taken me to spaces where I would not expect performance, or even normally go: Times Square, a highrise’s park, and now, for this lapsed Catholic, a church.

Churches are meant for community and stories. The sticking power of Nativity is that it understands both purposes while executing a product that, in a musical theatre landscape built on profit, chooses something more ancient: wine and good songs.

People still gather for that; of course, it helps that Nativity’s source material is pretty rich. But isn’t that why we keep hearing it, and coming together to hear it, retold in splendid and demented ways?