Elf

The brightly designed 2010 holiday tuner returns with a new star, Avenue Q vet Jordan Gelber, in the role played by Will Ferrell in the 2003 movie: a gawky manchild who leaves Santa's workshop to seek his birth father in New York. Directed with routinized showbiz gumption by Casey Nicholaw, the show’s corn doesn’t quite pop, but Gelber gives this fair holiday fare a welcome comic weirdness that was missing from the musical's first incarnation.—Adam Feldman