This review is from the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe. ‘Chriskirkpatrickmas’ transfers to the Seven Dials Playhouse for Christmas.
An all-female drag musical parody of ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’, that follows NSYNC founder Chris Kirkpatrick as he travels back in time to his boy band glory days with the aid of the ghost of Mark Wahlberg’s Marky Mark pop persona?
Only at the Fringe, riiiight? *snaps fingers*.
In fact, far from being a rickety student wheeze knocked up quickly for cheap laughs, ‘Chriskirkpatrickmas’ is a ten years in the making labour of love from the crack team of US talent that performs it. The seven-strong cast is headed by songwriter Valen Shore – who dons a goatee and straggly dreads to play Chris – and lyricist, book writer and director Alison Zatta, who plays the prodigiously Boston-accented spirit of Marky Mark (who split with Wahlberg after he successfully reinvented himself as an actor, and urges Kirkpatrick to do something similar).
As the show begins, it’s Christmas 2009 and four of the five members of NSYNC have gathered for their annual seasonal meetup. You can guess who’s missing: Justin Timberlake (Nicole Wyland) is off being super famous. The other three guys – that’s Lance (Riley Rose Critchlow), Joey (Elizabeth Ho) and JC (Mia-Carina Mollicone) – are pragmatic. Chris, though, insists that JT will show up; he also doggedly holds on to the fact that officially NSYNC are merely on hiatus while Justin has a go at a solo career.
It walks a fine line very well: I think Shore and Zatta sincerely doesn’t want to be excessively mean to Chris Kirkpatrick, and indeed a whole hour just calling him a loser would be a bit much. But at the same time, it *is* pretty funny, not least because it has a poignant ring of truth to it: in 2000 and 2001 the group Kirkpatrick founded put out two of the fastest-selling records in history; after the band went on hiatus in 2002 he never meaningfully worked as a musician again.
Crucially it’s not like Kirkpatrick was simply picked at random as a generic washed-up popstar. When Marky Mark takes Chris on a trip through his past, it’s abundantly clear that the writers are genuinely NSYNC-ophiles. Perhaps not obsessively so, but beyond the jokes, the show does offer a fairly factually accurate journey through the history of the boyband, as Marky Mark takes Chris to some key points in NSYNC’s development. He also makes him realise some home truths about the band, and how his role as its founder and eldest member might have given him a perspective on it different to the others (especially Justin - just 14 when he joined, when Kirkpatrick was 23).
Key to it all, of course, is the songs. Though there’s a funny joke early on about how they can’t get the performing rights to NSYNC’s catalogue, none of the band’s hits are actually about a future version of Chris Kirkpatrick travelling back through time with the spirit of Marky Mark, and so probably wouldn’t be as apt as one might think. Shore’s original tunes with amusing lyrics by Zatta are not perfect pastiches of the band’s slickly processed, heavily produced brand of late-‘90s/early ‘00s pop. But with the seven-strong, multi-tasking ensemble they do absolutely nail the baroque boy band harmonies (accepting that they’re all women).
In the end ‘Chriskirkpatrickmas’ feels mostly defined by the fact that an awful lot of love has been poured into it. It is not a standalone classic musical, band biography, or even Christmas show. But it’s a brilliant hybrid of all those things, in large part because all of its many, strange, elements are done just so, from the harmonies, to the queering effect of the all-female cast, to Chris as the slightly Partridge-esque sadsack hero, to the obvious genuine interest in the band NSYNC.
The band is clearly not coming back anytime soon. But this lovably odd tribute feels like it has a lot of distance left to run – hopefully, we’ll see it again one Christmas.