Holiday Sauce

This week I am very excited to go to a holiday show. There are plenty of perfectly fine productions of A Christmas Carol, there are a ton of Nutcrackers if that’s your thing. If you prefer your holiday with a side of depression there’s always Merry Christmas Charlie Brown, and if you really want to be part of the nostalgia-industrial complex you can go to a staged, musicalized version of A Christmas Story.  

But not for us, not this year. This year I got tickets to see Taylor Mac’s Holiday Sauce. It promises to deal with “Christmas as calamity,” drawing on Mac’s unpleasant childhood Christmases, and gatherings later in life that were actually joyous and loving. I don’t even know what to expect, except that it will be amazing, spectacular, and heartfelt.

Here’s how Taylor Mac describes Holiday Sauce: “We’re making a giant queer holiday. We are taking things that have harmed us and turning them into something joyous. The idea of caroling is something sweet with people singing. But if they’re singing a religious song and you grew up in a family where religion was used to oppress you, that song isn’t a gift. We transform that so caroling is good for everybody.” 

Taylor Mac is a MacArthur Genius Grant Fellow. Mac wrote and produced and performed a review of popular American music, by decade, with an hour for each decade. From 1776-2016. That’s 24 decades. So of course it was a 24-hour show, with a costume change for each decade. It was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Taylor Mac is a national treasure, and you should go see this show.

Seattle is the last stop on Mac’s tour, with performances Thurs-Fri, Dec. 19-20.  Tickets are still available. I don’t know what to expect, but I do know that you will have a good time. Perhaps you’ll even be moved to feel love and goodwill toward all.