Guest post by Nathan Arizona
“We Need a Little Christmas” is a Christmas song about celebrating Christmas when it’s not Christmastime.
Auntie Mame has just lost all her money in the 1929 stock market crash. She needs cheering up right now. So forget the calendar, “We Need a Little Christmas,” she tells her household. “Haul out the holly/Put up the tree before/My spirit falls again.”
So it must be, say, the middle of summer for this to be such a counter-intuitive move.
But then at the very end her young nephew Patrick says, “But Auntie Mame! It’s one week from Thanksgiving Day now.”
That’s when you know the Broadway musical “Mame” was written 60 years ago. These days one week before Thanksgiving might be exactly when the holly gets hauled out, if it’s not already too late. In this time of holiday creep the Halloween decorations start going up in September.
The musical “Mame” was based on the popular 1956 stage play “Auntie Mame” and the 1958 movie version, both starring Rosalind Russell. They in turn were based on a novel by Patrick Dennis.
For the free-spirited Mame Dennis the producers chose Angela Lansbury. She’s probably best known these days for her cozy TV mystery “Murder She Wrote.” Fans of old movies might remember her typecast as the hussy who tries to steal somebody’s boyfriend or husband.
But the stage is where she shines brightest, as anybody who saw her Mrs. Lovett in Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 musical “Sweeney Todd” can tell you. A movie version of “Mame” starring Lucille Ball. came out in 1974. The less said about that the better.
Jerry Herman wrote the music and lyrics. He was no Sondheim, but he could write a catchy tune. He proved it with “Hello Dolly” and “La Cage aux Folles.”
The popular contemporary a cappella group Penatonix found success with it, as it has with so many other Christmas songs.
The song doesn’t live only on stage. Sometimes it lives in the back of a pickup truck with Muppets on their way to some seasonally-appropriate Christmas cheer.
