Try enough times to turn a beloved holiday movie into a Broadway franchise (Elf, Irving Berlin’s White Christmas), and eventually one of them has to score. This is the one. Based on a silly little TV movie from the 1980s that has become a cult favorite among a certain generation, it’s the story of an Indiana kid named Ralphie whose obsessive mission is to get his parents to buy him a BB gun for Christmas. The show reproduces the film’s tone of sardonic nostalgia (narrated by the story’s author, humorist Jean Shepherd, played by Dan Lauria), as well as all of its fondly remembered scenes, from the grouchy department-store Santa to the kid who gets his tongue stuck to a frozen flagpole. Benj Pasek and Justin Paul’s songs are fairly obvious (one called “A Sticky Situation” for the flagpole scene), but always sprightly, cleverly staged and with a touch of self-parody — as when a schoolteacher turns into a tap-dancing maniac to deliver the film’s most memorable lesson: “You’ll shoot your eye out!” A new holiday tradition is born.
(MORE: The Most Wonderful Time of The Year: The Brilliance of Hallmark Channel’s Countdown to Christmas)