Take Two for a Middle-Aged Cindy Lou Who

Playwrights

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Playwright Matthew Lombardo was relaxing on a Fort Lauderdale beach with his longtime friend, director Rob Ruggiero, when the idea for Who’s Holiday! was hatched. Ruggiero asked Lombardo if he would pen a playlet for Christmas on the Rocks, an anthology of satirical shorts featuring twisted versions of iconic holiday characters. Lombardo said yes, but on one condition: he called dibs on Cindy Lou Who from Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

The resulting 10-minute solo piece, Going Green, debuted in 2013 at TheaterWorks in Hartford, CT with a 40-something Cindy Lou Who griping about her relationship with the Grinch in rhyme. “It knocked ’em dead,” Lombardo recalls. “And I thought, there’s something here. Maybe I need to expand on this and develop it into a full-length play.”

But then he decided to fight back…in court. “I had a responsibility to everyone involved in the project,” Lombardo says. “And, in a bigger-picture sense, I had a responsibility to artists everywhere who might have to go through something like this.”

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Ten months and thousands of dollars later, Lombardo prevailed and Who’s Holiday! has arrived at the Westside Theatre in a production starring Lesli Margherita of Matilda The Musical fame. Decked out in colorful Christmas kitsch, Cindy Lou preps for a party in her trailer while sipping cocktails, spilling sordid secrets, flirting with audience members, and crooning a few Christmas tunes. It’s definitely not rated G.

Although Who’s Holiday! may sound like a departure for Lombardo, who’s best known for the one-woman bio-plays Looped about Tallulah Bankhead and Tea at Five about Katharine Hepburn, it has a lot in common with those earlier works. “I like to write about women of a certain age who, well, are little crazy, a little delicately balanced, with seemingly insurmountable challenges in their lives who overcome and excel,” Lombardo says. “So a middle-aged Cindy Lou Who falls into my wheelhouse!”

Of course this is the first time Lombardo has written an entire play in Seussian rhyming verse, but there’s a reason it came fairly easily to him. “I have a big Sicilian family and whenever someone reaches a milestone, we do a poem for them,” he says. “My uncle Frank actually started the tradition and when he passed away, I took over. It’s usually something very funny or a little off-color.”

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TDF MEMBERS: At press time, discount tickets were available for Who’s Holiday!. Go here to browse our current offers.

Top image: Lesli Margherita in Who’s Holiday!. Photos by Carol Rosegg.

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