Elf The Musical is the hilarious and heartwarming tale of Buddy (Tony Award® nominee Grey Henson), a young orphan whose life is changed forever when he mistakenly crawls into Santa’s sack of toys one Christmas Eve. Raised by elves at the North Pole, Buddy’s enormous size and limited toy-making abilities make him realize he may not quite fit in! When he discovers he is actually human, Buddy embarks on a journey to New York City to find his birth father, and in turn, helps the Big Apple and the people he meets rediscover the true meaning of Christmas.
Hailed by Time Out as “a slickly irresistible and fizzily enjoyable confection of a show” that will “whirl you up in a technicolor dream of Christmas,” this modern-day holiday classic returns home to Broadway in an acclaimed new, record-breaking production that “has the magic to send you out of the theatre smiling and singing” (The Times of London).
If there are occasional glimmers that Elf has more going on than meets the eye, this production has done its best to convince you to grow up and stop believing in anything less than cold commercial logic. The show ends with its own flight of the DeLorean, this time with Santa’s sleigh and a ton of foam snow shot directly toward your seats. If it achieves a sense of spectacle, it’s only by way of brute force. I had to wipe a lot of crud off my glasses frames.
Henson, who was nominated for a Tony Award for his show-stealing turn as Damian in “Mean Girls,” makes Buddy utterly his own: sunny, darling, slightly unsettling. At the mention of tickle fights or snuggling, he emits a small noise that he doesn’t know is sexual, and moppets in the audience won’t either. That joke is aimed at the adults. It’s a tonic of a performance — the kind that makes you smile later, just thinking about it. The trouble is that Buddy is trapped inside “Elf the Musical,” a creaky adaptation whose two-and-a-half-hour length seems designed less to maximize audience enjoyment than to ensure there’s an intermission that people can spend buying merch.
2010 | Broadway |
Original Broadway Production Broadway |
2012 | US Tour |
NETworks National Tour US Tour |
2012 | Broadway |
Broadway Return Production Broadway |
2013 | US Tour |
NETworks National Tour US Tour |
West End |
West End West End |
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2015 | US Tour |
2015 Holiday Tour US Tour |
2017 | Off-Broadway |
Madison Square Garden Return Engagement Off-Broadway |
2022 | US Tour |
US Holiday Tour US Tour |
2024 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Production Broadway |
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