Marquis Theatre

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Christmas has come early to Broadway this year. Previous productions of the family-friendly comedic yuletide fable Elf The Musical, though pleasant enough, have seemed short on the very Christmas spirit—an ineffable sense of animating joy—that the musical is about. Its current revival, however, is another story entirely. To be honest, I wasn’t eager to see Elf get taken down from the shelf yet again. But my grinchiness soon vanished, to be replaced with a big wide grin. For the first time in my experience, this show is really elfin’ good.  Elf is based on the 2003 movie that starred Will Ferrell as a grown man named Buddy, raised in holly as one of Santa’s helpers at the North Pole, who belatedly learns that he’s human and travels to New York in search of his father. Adapted by the late Thomas Meehan and the same team that would later create The Prom—book writer Bob Martin, composer Matthew Sklar and lyricist Chad Beguelin—the script is faithful to David Berenbaum’s screenplay (including many of its most famous lines). But the miscast production that premiered on Broadway in 2010 seemed somehow both shiny and old; in my review, I described it as “a brightly wrapped and beribboned box with a hand-me-down sweater inside.” It had a better Buddy when it returned to Broadway in 2012, but it still didn’t jingle my bells.  Elf The Musical | Photograph: Courtesy Evan Zimmerman Elf’s third time is the charm. The most obvious change is the bright...