Poor Ruth Claus. As Hell in a Handbag’s Christmas 2025 offering The Real Housewives of the North Pole opens, her year-long sobriety gets put to the test.
Santa and other North Pole VIPs—Frosty the Snowman and Jack Frost among them—are in jail for racketeering, so Ruth (Honey West) is at the end of her financial and emotional ropes, stuck in what she calls a peppermint hell. But Andy Cohen (David Lipschultz) comes calling, pitching a reality series documenting tribulations of the wives the North Pole racketeers have left behind. Cohen is of course banking on Ruth falling off the wagon—when he’s not trying to get in the pants of elf Carlos (Taylor Mercado Owen), Ruth’s houseboy and “recovery coach/sobriety companion.”
Ruth’s reluctant at first, but she gives in, wielding tight dresses and big hair like battle armor as she goes to head-to-head with frenemies like the whiny Clarice (Anna Rose Steinmeyer), Rudolph’s wife; adult diaper brand ambassador Suzy Snowflake (Britain Shutters); performatively Christian Samantha Frosty Snowwoman (Robert Williams); and Gladys Dasher (author David Cerda), who’s plastic surgeried within an inch of her life.
There’s no plot to speak of in The Real Housewives of the North Pole; the play simply follows the course of the show’s first season: Ruth’s nervous breakdown in a restaurant, which goes viral; a launch for “Shitty Pants,” Suzy’s diaper brand; filming the video to “Snow,” Gladys’s autotuned-to-hell dance track; and—of course—the ubiquitous end-of-season reunion show. Ruth sort of takes a figurative hero’s journey and self-actualizes, but that’s the closest this comes from actually taking the audience from points A to B on a narrative arc.
But nobody watches an actual Real Housewives show for clever narrative arcs anyway. Fans are there for passive-aggressiveness, seething resentments, catty behind-your-back insults and enemy-making emotional outbursts. North Pole has got those in spades, and it’s fun to see the ladies degrade themselves in search of stardom. One character suggests to another, “Why not go back into show business? It’s like prostitution, only a little less degrading.”
West is terrific as Ruth, opening the play with a mix of exhausted panic and residual haughtiness, as Santa’s spouse tries to figure out what to do with herself after her husband’s incarceration. Williams steals much of the show as Samantha. Her haughtiness is not “residual”; she’s a successful entrepreneur, and projects full-throated attitude and authority, even when we know her professed religious devotion is fake as hell.
Cerda’s Gladys is falling apart at the seams, even if she’s the biggest risk-taker of the bunch. A highlight is Gladys squeezed into a red PVC sausage-case jumpsuit, complemented with a sparkly green-fringed jacket. Shutters and Steinmeyer bring to Suzy and Clarice respectively the entitlement and assuredness of younger Real Housewives, contrasting nicely with their older, more world-weary co-stars.
The show ran too long, and the performers seemed to have restricted movement thanks to the small stage at Handbag’s performing space. Regular video interstitials consisting of closed-door interviews and news broadcasts about the Housewives open things up somewhat. Special mention should go to the costumes by Marquecia Jordan—besides the aforementioned PVC jumpsuit, many costumes—especially Samantha and Suzy’s—managed to be both gaudy and exquisite.
As on any real Housewives show, it’s the characters themselves—their trashiness, their humiliations, their oxygen-sucking outbursts—at the center of all this. In a holiday season diminished by the threat of war, rising prices and politicians who just won’t shut the hell up, The Real Housewives of the North Pole offers a nice antidote and gives off legitimate holiday cheer.
The Real Housewives of the North Pole runs through Jan. 4, 2026, at The Clutch, 4335 N. Western Ave. See here for tickets and other information.