A Gleeful Christmas
11/6/2018 12AM
Jane Lynch brings humorous holiday revue to the Palladium
By Scott Hall
You probably think of her as the villainous Sue Sylvester on Fox TV’s Glee, or demanding dog trainer Christy Cummings from the mockumentary Best in Show.
In real life, however, actress Jane Lynch isn’t nearly that scary. She’ll prove it Dec. 1, when she brings her holiday musical revue, A Swingin’ Little Christmas, to the Palladium.
The production is an affectionate sendup of classic Christmas albums and TV specials from decades past – cultural statements put forth by folks like Bing Crosby, Andy Williams, Perry Como, Ella Fitzgerald and Rosemary Clooney.
The program mixes traditional holiday tunes with original numbers of a similar vein, written, arranged and performed by Los Angeles-based trumpeter Tony Guerrero and his jazz quintet. Lynch spearheads the three-part vocal harmonies with help from friends Kate Flannery, best known as the dissolute Meredith on NBC’s The Office, and Tim Davis, vocal arranger for all six seasons of Glee.
“We’re clean as a whistle,” promises Lynch, an Illinois native. “Sometimes we sound a little like the Andrews Sisters or the King Family.”
Lynch points to Flannery as the secret weapon: “She has an amazing voice, and she’s a throwback – she sounds like somebody from the late ’50s, early ’60s. She’s also got a crazy sense of humor.”
The group came together in 2016 to record an album version of A Swingin’ Little Christmas, and they introduced the live show that year at Feinstein’s at the Nikko, Michael Feinstein’s signature cabaret club in San Francisco. But Lynch and Flannery go back more than two decades as veterans of Chicago’s improv comedy scene, having performed first with Second City and later with the Annoyance Theatre. Each moved on to other projects, in Lynch’s case an endless list of TV, film, cartoon and advertising work: Two and a Half Men, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Talladega Nights and beyond. One job was an insect-infested 2001 episode of The X-Files with actor Aaron Paul, later to become Breaking Bad’s Jesse Pinkman.
“I just ran into him at a car wash, and we relived our X-Files experience together,” Lynch says, recalling the traumatic makeup ordeal. “They had to make a fake of my head that the spider web shot out of.”
The big break came when Lynch was cast in a quirky Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes commercial directed by writer-comedian Christopher Guest, who then placed her in four of his acclaimed comedy films built around improvised dialog and documentary-style direction. The first was 2000’s Best in Show, a deadpan take on the culture surrounding high-profile dog pageants.
“There was kind of a floodgate that opened after that,” Lynch says. “People started to know my name, and if they didn’t know my name, they knew my face. So offers started coming my way.”
Soon came Glee, an unlikely TV smash about plucky misfits in a high school choral group. Lynch won Emmys and countless other awards as her character evolved improbably from cheerleading coach to high school principal to vice president of the United States.
After that, opportunities abounded, and in 2013, Lynch got her bucket-list ticket to Broadway as the nasty Miss Hannigan in Annie. That gave her the bug to sing, and she thought of Flannery.
“After Glee ended and The Office ended for her, we got together and decided, ‘Let’s put our act on the road,’” says Lynch, who meanwhile serves as host of NBC’s Hollywood Game Night. “And we found this terrific band! We’re the luckiest girls, because we’ve got these five guys out of Orange County, and they’re called the Tony Guerrero Quintet, and they go with us everywhere. They’re the best. They’re great jazz players, but they can also play anything else.”
