Warm and wonderful Christmas Memories

You can keep your Shreks and your Lemony Snickets. Give me the human warmth of a corny holiday musical any day.

I use the word "corny" with love – if it's not a little corny, a little sentimental, then it's not really a holiday musical. And A Christmas Memory at the Lucie Stern Theatre, a TheatreWorks production, is a genuine holiday musical.

In its world-premiere production, A Christmas Memory hits all the right notes in every sense. The score by Larry Grossman (music) and Carol Hall (lyrics) is appealingly old-fashioned and catchy. There are a couple numbers that actually make you believe the charms of well-made musical theater are ageless. And the book by Duane Poole captures the magic of the Truman Capote story while finding effective ways of filling it out. The story, first published in Mademoiselle magazine in 1956, is short and so vivid it's almost like poetry. The musical is just as vivid, in part, because its creators have hewed so closely to the original but without making the finished product seem hampered by the faithfulness.