How do you compete with Santa Claus this time of year? With the reindeer cookies, Mariah Carey all over the radio, for crying out loud, with the Hallmark Channel and their same recycled plot presented 24 new different ways each December? With an un-spellable, totally not as important as other Jewish high-holy-holidays show all about Hanukkah! Hannukah? Channukah? Chanukkah? The eight-crazy-nights-holiday! That one! While everyone else is serving up A Christmas Carol, Sandy Spring Theatre Group (in partnership with The City of Gaithersburg) is rolling the dreidel and taking their chances on this brand-new (seriously, April of 2025) work written by Jeremy Desmon & Victor Wishna— The Dreidel Players Present Best Hanukkah Show Ever! Directed by David Fialkoff, this send-up to holiday shows has a lot of SNL-component vignette-segments to it that make it meta, humorous, and loaded with potential.
Let’s get to the coal at the bottom of the stocking, the socks in the box, the less-pleasant aspects straight away— the play’s placing seems to have undergone the curse of Snowmeiser and is thusly frozen in a way that makes it really difficult to enjoy. The humor is definitely there but the extended scenic changes (with lengthy intervals between action moments) is robbing the audience of their spirited enjoyment potential. (It seems like some of these changes are hampered by actors who complete one scene and then have to reappear in the next scene either in a different costume or different location, which could be addressed perhaps with an extra hand backstage to help get quick-changes accomplished, or perhaps reassigning the character tracks in a way that allows more expedient actors to do so more fluidly.) There’s also some gummy-pacing in scenes and this falls to some of the actors being a little uncertain of their lines (one of whom appeared to be reading lines from a prompt book, but it’s unclear if that was because they were a last-minute addition or some other extenuating circumstance.) Director David Fialkoff needs to take some of that miracle-burning oil and light a fire under the pacing of the scenes to really maximize the comic potential of the production as whole. There are also moments where Fialkoff doesn’t push the scenes far enough. The whole ‘Mega-Sport-Dreidel-Spinoff’ scene is crying out for a ratcheted-up level of camp, bordering n farce, and Fialkoff just doesn’t push it there. The same is true of the action-figures scene. There are other scenes, like the opening bid, where Ronit Miller as the ‘Marketing Pitch Gal’ is really on-point at driving home that high-octane, intensely-delivered humor but her scene-mates are operating at a more languid, lower-key pace and dynamic; this is a consistent issue throughout, where some players are running with a full eight-candles’ worth of energy, effervescence, and enthusiasm and others are sort of half-lit. But the script has brilliant potential!
The show itself is cobbled together (written to be) so the nature of the design team comes together in this beautiful slapdash fashion that reads like an old-school-hail-Mary-holiday-attempt and that’s delightful. Lighting Designer Kirk Patton, Scenic Design Team David Fialkoff, Tony Pisarra, and Jerry Callistein, Sound Designer Jerry Callisterin, and Costume Designer Trish Pisarra, work together as one family unit to achieve success in the aesthetic simplicity of this show. One of the finest achievements is the ‘In Memoriam’ segment— it’s hilarious (and I won’t go into spoiler-iffic details about who it’s for) and the AV effects there are perfect. You get cute props (basically from the whole cast and crew) and a sense of ‘let’s make a play’ which is the perfect meta-match for the nature of Desmon & Wishna’s script.
The nine players— pretty sure that was wholly intentional on Desmon and Wishna’s part, as you get one actor for each candle-night of Hanukkah and then the ninth super-candle that lights all the other candles and sits at the center of the menorah— do work well together and in moments where their exchanges are delivered at pace, they create a lot of hilarious moments. The play is wholly Hanukkah focused (as the title might blatantly imply) and a lot of the humor will resonate with anyone who has any sort of working familiarity with Jewish culture and religious practices. Becky Batt, Ronit Miller, Trish Pisarra, Marc Rehr, MollyBeth Rushfield, Tom Schiller, Ed Silverstein, Deb Solomon, and Steve Truland makeup the players who pop in and out of various roles all throughout, with the primary four being Ronit Miller as Simone, Trish Pisarra as Gloria, MollyBeth Rushfield as Barb, and Tom Schiller as Walter. (Everyone plays multiple characters in this and it’s a dizzying fun experience trying to figure out who’s who!)
You get ‘The Dreidel Players’ spearheaded by Pisarra’s Gloria, desperate to try and make a Hanukkah-style hit that’s just as impactful and impressive as A Christmas Carol, and her stalwart team of helpful-hopefuls— Simone (Ronit Miller), Barb (MollyBeth Rushfield), and Walter (Tom Schiller.) What could possibly go wrong? Pisarra is over-the-top in the best way possible, the theatre crowd (really, any crowd) would call that character ‘extra.’ But like guacamole, she’s worth paying for all that extra. Expressive and humorous and finding those little moments that really get the audience giggling, you feel connected the most to her character’s desperation. Rushfield’s Barb has that delicately balanced charm of a ‘never-was’ theatre-star— the kind who’s always stuck in the understudy track but just knows she could do better if only she’d be given the chance; she’s a real gem to watch. Schiller’s Walter-the-dentist character has such bad ‘Dad-joke-puns’ and they are delivered with such sincerity that you’ll giggle while you groan. Miller, as Simone, is one of the most engaging actors on the stage, particularly in her opening scene where she’s playing that Gen-Z-marketing gal who has no clue what she’s talking about and keeps repeating herself to better clarify her explanations whilst thinking she knows everything (it’s an excellent and accurate representation of so many in that generation when it comes to marketing!)
There’s a lot of enthusiasm from the other performers— Becky Batt, Marc Rehr, Ed Silverstein, Deb Solomon, and Steve Truland— especially in that one tidbit vignette about being jingle writers where you get Truland and Batt together. And Truland on the whole is really humorous, particularly as an action figure and during his sports-desk-commentator moments. All nine players are giving it their holiday best, putting some Ha-ha into Hanukkah (Channukah? Hanukah? All of the above!) and it’s a cute, quirky, change-of-pace for the holiday season. And besides, if multi-million-dollar-international commercial corporations aren’t reminding you that Hanukkah is here for the season— who else will let you know it’s time to celebrate Hanukkah? Sandy Spring Theatre Group, that’s who! You see them this Chanukah season (or Hanukkah season, or Channukah season…) and catch their production of The Dreidel Players Present Best Hanukkah Show Ever! at the Arts Barn in Gaithersburg running through— gasp— the first evening of Hanukkah 2025! (The show starts at 2pm that day and will be concluded before sundown so you can still go home and celebrate!)
Running Time: Approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes with one intermission
The Dreidel Players Present Best Hanukkah Show Ever! plays through December 14th 2025 as a co-production between the Sandy Spring Theatre Group & The City of Gaithersburg in the Arts Barn— 311 Kent Square Road in Gaithersburg, MD. Tickets are available at the door, by calling the box office at 301-258-6394 or in advance online.