Musical Mondays: X-Mas: A Merry Mutant Holiday Spectacular

Hello most faithful readers, apologies for the delay in posts. I was dealing with a family emergency and all that life entails. Isn’t life the pits sometimes? You know what isn’t the pits? Musicals! With the exception of PITS! The Musical, I think we can all agree musicals are in fact not very pitsy at all. Thesaurus.com tells me that the top antonym of pit is bulge, so do with that what you will.

This will be the first in a weekly post here on the website I will brilliantly, innovatively, and most alliteratively call Musical Mondays. I think there is so much theater out there that goes unnoticed or undiscovered, and I want weekly just to point out something I really enjoy. Maybe it’s a performance I’ve previously seen, maybe it’s a song off some soundtrack I’m listening to, or maybe it’s me singing the best damn song you’ve ever heard. It won’t be the last option. It might be.

Our inaugural Musical Monday selection is one of the most fun concert readings I have ever been to: X-Mas: A Merry Mutant Holiday Spectacular, which is a musical parody of the famous mutant super hero team celebrating the holiday season. Full disclosure: my dog is named after the Incredible Hulk and I still have Christmas lights in the living room of my apartment. This piece was a Prince song or two away from being a musical called Clint’s Favorite Things. That being said—this is actually a really fun time.

Here is a snippet of the opening number from 2016:

I saw this at The Duplex in New York, and while I was initially excited for just a roll call of some of my favorite X-Men from growing up reading the comics (real missed opportunity for Gambit—the best of the X-Men), it took me a little bit longer to get into the musical itself. I’m not sure if the first few songs were less entertaining or it took me a while to get used to the reading. (Spoiler alert: I do not go to a ton of play readings. I feel this is a thing one does if they had really cool artsy friends. My friends growing up were neither artsy nor particularly cool. Here’s to changing that—the lack of play readings. I am not in the market for replace all of my friends either individually or en masse.)

The performances were fine at the reading and the overall musical was a lot of fun, but there is one reason above all else I want to highlight this musical. It featured a song that had me laughing harder than any song I remember in a long time: Jesus was a Mutant. The song isn’t overtly sacrilegious but rather explains that Jesus must have had mutant powers in order to accomplish so many miracles.

I was a comic book reading youth who often got in a lot of trouble for asking questions in Sunday school like: why didn’t Jesus just get off the cross or how did Jesus actually turn water into wine and can I learn? Imminently reasonable questions I thought, but ones that didn’t sit particularly well with the various teachers I had at the church. If someone had simply explained to a young Clint that Jesus was a mutant, it all would’ve made sense. The song was 20 years too late to assist my young life, but it was right on time in the musical.

I don’t know if this piece will be put on again at the end of this year as it was the past two, but I can assure if it is that I will be in attendance.

X-Mas: A Merry Mutant Holiday Spectacular was produced by Charissa Bertels with music by Christian Duhamel book and lyrics by Sarah Mucek.