MORE NAUGHTY THAN NICE,
WITH PLENTY OF SPICE

✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦

As they have for the past thirty years, Ryan Landry’s Gold Dust Orphans honor the saturnalian origins of Christmas with a holiday burlesque. This time the target of the spoofing crew of shamelessly talented punsters, dancers, singers, and actors is Sweeney Todd. Sweeney (Thain Bertin) is a reindeer formerly of Santa’s retinue who has lost his beloved wife and his daughter Johanna, a platinum blonde reindeer fawn (Mary Mahoney) to a furrier who plans to skin them for their fur. Determined to seek revenge and rescue his daughter from sexual enslavement by a randy Santa Claus (Tim Lawton), Sweeney teams up with Mrs. Leaveit (Ryan Landry) to murder his victims and turn their flesh into sausage rolls. Meanwhile, the earnest young sailor Semen (T Perry) attempts to rescue the beautiful Johanna and carry her to Brookline, Massachusetts (where, according to Semen, Christmas is not celebrated due to the predominantly Jewish population).

Few taboos are left unbroken in this roller-coaster of raunch. Coal miners with 24-inch cocks prance about the stage along with “Get Me to the Church on Time.” Reindeer and Pillsbury Doughboys engage in simulated sex acts. There are swinging tits and a naked dick. Most shocking of all, at one point Johanna screams, “I hate the Red Sox!”

Ryan Landry and Thain Bertin

The production is both impressive in its complexity and charmingly amateurish at times (which is likely the intention–though the uneven sound quality is probably inadvertent). Songs are vigorously parodied by the Scituate Sisters (Tad McKitterick, Lizette Morris, and Dominka Zawada): “Silver Bells” becomes “Silver Blades” and “Chain of Fools” becomes “Chained and Screwed.” There are too many jokes to count, and almost as many deliberately comic costumes by Scott Martino (reindeer, nuns, pirates, toilets, horror clowns, rats). As always, the production includes puppets representing local public radio hosts Jim Braude and Margery Eagan, who comment on the production with words they could never get away with saying on the radio. Action takes place on the main stage as well as on risers on either side of it, and a large screen plays a series of video clips from famous and not-so-famous movies that comment on the action (sets are also by Martino). It’s a lot to look at, and impossible to see it all, but it doesn’t matter—the onslaught of bawdy nonsense is an experience in itself.

Written by Ryan Landry and directed by Kiki Samko (also appearing as the Beggar Woman), Sweeney Claus is its own brand of Christmas cheer—a mix of the lewd and the loud with lots and lots of laughter.

✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦

photos by Michael von Redlich

Sweeney Claus: The Demon Father of Sleet Street
Gold Dust Orphans
The Iron Wolf Theatre
South Boston Lithuanian Citizens Association, 368 West Broadway
Thurs-Sat at 7:30; Sat & Sun at 4
ends on December 21, 2025
for tickets ($65-$100), visit Gold Dust Orphans or Ticket Tailor

for more shows, visit Theatre in Boston

✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦

BIO: Lynne Weiss is a member of the Boston Theater Critics Association. Her work has also appeared in Literary Ladies Guide and in The Common, Black Warrior Review, and the Ploughshares Blog. She has an MFA from UMass Amherst and has received residencies from Yaddo, the Millay Colony, and Vermont Studio Center and grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. A lifelong social justice activist, she is at work on a novel set in 1930s Cornwall. Her reviews, travel tales, and progressively optimistic opinions are on her substack.