Miracle on 34th Street

Miracle on 34th Street sends a white-bearded stranger into a department store Santa suit and lets him insist, calmly and without blinking, that he is the genuine Kris Kringle. What starts as a seasonal hiring problem turns into a public argument about whether belief has any standing in a practical world.

Doris Walker runs the store's Thanksgiving parade and has raised her young daughter Susan to trust facts and nothing softer. The Santa she hires in a hurry proves unnervingly good at the job, so good that he begins sending shoppers to rival stores when a better toy can be found there. Goodwill follows. So does trouble, once his employers decide a man who claims to be Santa Claus ought to be examined by a court.

The story began as a 1947 tale by Valentine Davies, filmed the same year and absorbed into the seasonal repertory almost at once. It reached the musical stage in 1963 and has stayed there, its songs built around the shop floor, the parade and the courtroom. What survives every retelling is the spine: a sceptical child, a stubborn old man, and a bureaucracy asked to rule on faith.

On stage the piece runs warm rather than saccharine. Its comedy comes from adults behaving like children about Christmas and a child behaving like an adult about everything else, while the score carries the moments the plot plays straight. The courtroom act lands as farce with real stakes underneath it, a demand for proof of something that cannot be proved.

It suits families with children old enough to follow an argument, and anyone who likes a Christmas story with a spine of dry wit. Live, the pleasure is watching a room full of sceptics, onstage and off, get talked round in song.