By Elissa Barnard - The Chronicle Herald

It's home for the holidays this year for fans of Bette MacDonald and Maynard Morrison.

Fom the minute MacDonald's character, Wayne Tomko, opened Tuesday nights show at the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium, a raucous and eager audience was applauding and laughing.

Later when Mary Morrison took on an unusual part in her church's Christmas pageant people howled with laughter and took off their glasses to wipe tears from their eyes, The duo got a standing ovation the second the two hour how ended.

It's obvious that people have missed seeing their favourite characters created by this husand-and-wife Cape Breton comedy powerhouse in the Cape Breton Summertime Revue and other shows.

In this brand new holiday revue, Tis the Season, MacDonald and Morrison deliver and deliver - jokes, wonderful characters, hilarious stories of holiday fiascos, and a casual warmth the two project when they appear as themselves.

Tis the Season is a winning format as an affectionate and hilarious holiday show rooted n Cape Breton culture, but universal in its expression.

Tis the Season alternates between a fever pitch of comedy in skits and storytelling and - as a kind of breather - serious, intimate performances of classic winter songs by MacDonald, who loves winter, and Morrison. The two sing Baby It's Cold Outside with MacDonald's clear, sweet voice rising above Morrison's plainer, more gravelly one.

Even during the singing MacDonald can't help but being funny, talking about how one should always sit down in a dress before purchasing it or how many gimmick gifts there are for golfers.

The songs and the light affection between MacDonad and Morrison make the audience feel like it's part of a family gathered around a fire to celebrate the holidays.

The comic characters don't fare so well, Cecil has a lot of trouble getting little Cecil and Cecilia not to torment a mall Santa; Martin MacKinnon, who has found a new bar, Losers, next to the Winners store, mistakenly gets a live turkey delivered to his house in a story that has a wonderful twist in its ending.

Lounge singer, Beulah Claxton tries, hard to live up to the sex appeal in her white feather. trimmed, red concoction, but she feels more like a bird than a seductress, and, on Tuesday night, one of the men she was playing to in the audience, nicknamed Sugarplum, dumped her for his wife of 5 years.

Wayne Tomko decides the holidays are the right time to pop the question to Darlene if she'll give up her fixation on Matt Minglewood, and Mary Morrison has a lot of trouble with Gordie and his crazy family.

The love for MacDonald's Mary Morrison is amazing and this show give fans three good helpings of her, the highlight being the absolutely brilliant sketch in which she and the priest, wonderfully played as a nervous and increasingly alarmed man, Morrison, are forced by senior cast members' illnesses to take on lead roles in the Christmas pageant.

Here, the writing seems to have flowed like water to create a lobbing of funny line after funny line like a fantastic snowball fight.

As always, Morrison and MacDonald are fun to watch just in terms of their comic control and timing if you can stop laughing long enough to perceive it.

Keyboard player and guitarist Ralph Dillon, a childhood friend of Morrison's, plays lovely, teasing musical segues as well as backup and appears in the role of Wayne's silent buddy Cujo.

Tis the Season is a winning format as an affectionate and hilarious holiday show rooted n Cape Breton culture but universal in its expression.

It runs Saturday, 6p.m., Astor Theatre, Liverpool ($27 including taxes and surcharge), Sunday, Decoste Centre, Pictou (sold out); Monday pm., Rebecca Cohn ($32 plus service charges) and Friday Dec. 28, 8:30 p.m., at the Membertou Trade & Convention Centre (sold out) in Sydney.

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