Cue Christmas! The Stars of A CHRISTMAS STORY LIVE Share Secrets from Set!

Hello, I'm Richard Ridge for Broadway World. We're in Hollywood on the Warner's Lot to bring you a behind-the-scenes look at Fox's upcoming A Christmas Story Live, which will air on December 17th

Welcome to our little Christmas magic cul-de-sac on Warner Brothers Lot. I'm so excited I can barely speak about it

It's so cool. I cannot describe how happy I am to do this. Take a look around at these sets

If this is not Christmas to the nth degree, I don't know what it is

This project is the culmination of every dream I had as a kid to be a performer

It's unlike anything I've ever done. I sort of came in thinking, oh, this would be like putting on a Broadway show and we'll just film it

Like, I know a little bit about TV and I know a little bit about Broadway. Maybe those will just come together

And it's nothing like that. its own entity entirely, that Mark Blatt, I think, does so well

And he's teaching us all the way he does it. And so we're almost at the home run, we're in the home stretch

and we'll see how it turns out on December 17th. I really like the play. I saw it on Broadway with Dan Lauria and John Ballman and Aaron Dillian

and loved it and all of them. And I just thought it was such a nice piece of material

I like Gene Shepard anyway, and then also Scott Ellis is a good friend

and he said, well, I'm doing it, so why should you not do it

So I said, okay. You've never done a musical before. No, I thought that I had done a musical before, only to realize that I hadn't

I incorporate music in the stuff that I write, and I feel comfortable there. However, it's never really been a proper musical

And I actually didn't know what that was. But it's real. It's serious

It's a lot. It's hard. The first embers of my understanding of wanting to perform

were watching Danny Kaye movies or Bing Crosby movies. And I didn't recognize that those films took months of work

and they would stop and start and reset lights and camera. I just thought that someone said action and they performed the musical for two and a half hours

Having worked on Broadway and having worked in television and film, this is actually the closest I will have gotten to living out that childhood dream of action and let's do a musical

The score has amazing music written by Pasek and Paul. Amazing writers, by the way

My favorite song has to be Ralphie to the Rescue, which is like a transfer to the old west sort of style which is really cool This is really exciting You know partly it because we got to write new material for this and we got to really flesh out the show because this is going to be on for three hours

so we had to sort of expand some of the material. As personally, I'm the Jewish half of this duo

There's going to be a Hanukkah number. He had gotten so sick of writing all these Christmas songs at the holidays

He was like, I think you need to write one Hanukkah song. They say that lots of Christmas songs are written by Jews

but why not a Hanukkah song co-written by a Christian? I mean. See what I'm saying

That's what the world needs, right? Hanukkah Sire's going to sing that, and it's fun

It's called In the Market for a Miracle, and it's kind of like a brassy musical theater number

It's like, yeah, hot jazz meets klezmer, whatever that might be. Obviously the show doesn't have a Hanukkah moment

It's a very, you know, Christmassy affair. So it's nice to have it just from that standpoint

but also they really made it work in terms of story. That's where you see what professionals they are

It's so different than the Broadway show. Like new songs, new structure

So we're putting together a new musical and it's going to be taped. So there's that whole process

And then while all of that is going on, we've also been working really hard in the studio

recording for an album that will be released once the show airs on the 17th

The only version of A Christmas Story that was ever recorded was when we were out of town at Seattle Fifth Avenue

That was seven years ago. Yeah, at 2010. The first draft of the show, really. Right. And so we developed it, you know, subsequently two more years before it got to Broadway

So there were many changes that went into it. New songs, rewritten lyrics

I mean, it was very, very different and we didn't have a recording of it. So now with this telecast, we get the chance to go in with this amazing cast

And this feels like the completion of, you know, a seven-year journey with the show to have an album that really reflects what the musical has now become

What's really exciting is the scope of this. You know, we're shooting practically

As you said, it's an actual house. It's not on a soundstage. It's a house, and inside there's a kitchen and bedrooms

and then when we get out of the house, we get into the car, and we drive through the town square and go to Higby's

I mean, it's really a massive undertaking that the cameras are going to follow us around, and we're going to be singing, and we're not going to have ear monitors

So we're really going to have to sort of just cross our fingers and trust that we can do this

You know, as the narrator, for instance, I can discuss what's about to happen or what just happened

walking down a street and turn and go into a building, and there's the family eating their dinner

So the sets are in real time, and they're inside of the real exterior

We're also where Robert Preston shot Trouble in The Music Man, which every now and then I hold up a camera

and it's very little changed, so that's kind of cool. We're going to do, like, one scene and do the songs there

and then we going to hop on a golf cart and zoom to the next set until the commercial break ends Is that really exciting The most exciting thing for you is the golf cart right Yes and for the past few days we actually been timing how long it takes to get there

so we know how much time we have. Right now what we're doing is we're taking cameras and putting them on set

So we blocked everything and now we're putting the cameras in and deciding, well, where does the cameras go

We're really blocking cameras and then we go, we look at all the shots

and then we'll go through and go, that's a good shot or let's change that shot. So this is what we're doing

and we're actually putting cameras on everything. So that's the process that you do

and it's the first time, actually the first time, we're seeing it with different cameras

We've seen it on wide shots, but now we're seeing where the cameras are going

and when do you go for a tight shot, when do you go for a two-shot. So that's how now the storytelling really begins

because we have to tell you that. The tricky part comes in with Alex, our live director

because we have to make sure everything matches for cameras. So, you know, a lot of things that were in theory, oh, we can shoot it this way and this way

Now you're in a room and it's like, oh, well, it's so much smaller than we thought

So now it's just a lot of sort of micro changes to make sure it'll all come together

You watched your assistant earlier teaching some of the kids on the playground

So there's always rehearsals going on somewhere else in the building, right? There's always something happening, especially in our department, if we can grab anyone to sort of clean up

And kids are a little different because repetition helps. So anytime that they're down and they're not in school and they're not with their R&R and everything

if we can get them for 10 minutes, we will grab them and just kind of keep drilling them and see what we can get out of them

I used to tap back in the day. There hasn't been much call for me to tap in the latter half of my career until this

And I'm thrilled by that. And that's been one of the most fun things, to re-get that brain working

If anybody's seen me in the last few weeks, you'll see me at the grocery store on the subway

just trying to remember how to remember all the movements. In Jane's fantasy number, well, her shoot your eye out, that idea of he, Ralphie, gets his paper

which doesn't get an A, it's a C+, and at the bottom, she has said, you'll shoot your eye out

And that's what triggers this fantasy of him going, oh my gosh, the teacher is never going to help me get this gun

And from that, the whole place, the whole schoolhouse breaks apart. And so the fantasy then transfers from the schoolhouse into this nightclub that she then becomes this big tap dancer number

This number basically telling Ralphie, you're going to shoot your eye. You're not going to get it

Unbeknownst to me, I did not realize that You'll Shoot Your Eye Out was one of the most famous lines from the show

As now that I talking about it with people or people come up to me saying Oh we can wait to see the show on December 17th I thought it was like Fragile or the tongue on the flagpole I come to realize that if people are not familiar which one it is if you say you shoot your eye out

they know. So I thought that's put a little bit more pressure on my number considering it's called You'll Shoot Your

Eye Out. What do you do in this broadcast? What will you all be doing? You're carolers? Tell me

We're carolers and we just go from different scene to different scene. We're seeing

classic Christmas songs. We're going to be harmonizing a little bit, looking pretty

And it was pretty cold All in 1940s attire We went back to the Gene Shepard story

The original story Not the movie, not the Broadway Which we are part movie, part Broadway

We're a hybrid We're this live television But we went back And everything I showed him

We just said, well, it's really Norman Rockwell It's really Norman Rockwell

So if you look at these wonderful Norman Rockwell pictures of Christmas

Norman Rockwell sort of summarized and celebrated and brought, made into iconic images on the covers of the Saturday Evening Post, Americana

What are you looking forward to the most about the night of? Honestly, when it's over

Having a good time working and doing this for the last time. I want to be over and back home and nothing terrible to have happened

Honestly, it's just a very magical Christmas event. And I don't feel like people come to it as much with a sort of hostile sense of entitlement to it

as much as just I hope that they can just sit back and wrap their presents and enjoy it. Because I know these live musicals have their share of, you know, hate watchers

And hopefully, I just don't feel like this one merits that. It's sort of a happy, peaceful song and dance affair

A Christmas Story is really about the messiness of the holidays and how when the most unexpected things happen

or when things don't go the way that you plan, sometimes that's what actually creates the best memories

You know, when the dog eats the turkey or when you think you're not going to get the gift that you want

or when your dad is cursing or all these things that feel like crazy and terrible

So we're kind of thinking maybe if... Well, just lean into that with the whole live element of the show

With dogs and children, all the things that could go wrong, maybe 10 years from now we'll be like, ah, that was hilarious

Maybe the night of we'll be panicking, but maybe it'll all end up okay. The second that telecast starts, anything can happen

And that is entirely nerve-wracking and overwhelming, and at the same time, utterly exciting

because spontaneity is going to be what makes it magical. I just hope that it comes off to the audience at home

with the same joy and all the hard work that everyone's put into it live as we're here

Tune in to A Christmas Story Live on Fox. December 17th. Thank you

There you go