Movie Review :: Hallmark Channel’s Oy to the World!

Hallmark Channel

Hallmark Channel’s ‘Countdown to Christmas’ series of movies takes a brief detour with its latest offering to celebrate the Festival of Lights, Hanukkah, as two holidays collide in Oy to the World!.

The movie begins about twenty years earlier as high school rivals Nikki Roberts and Jake Cohen are preparing to compete in a holiday talent show at school — except it isn’t a competition but Nikki has an axe to grind with Jake for some reason. As she takes to the mic, Nikki begins her song and … her voice cracks. All she can see and hear is the audience laughing wildly at her (likely this is only in her head) and she runs off stage humiliated. Now as an adult, Nikki has given up any dream she had of being a singer, while Jake has moved to New York City, starting his own band … which has a following but isn’t known much outside of the Big Apple. Jake’s mother tells everyone he works in the music industry, but his real day job is working at a music store selling guitars to kids who want to be the next Eddie Van Halen. As he is preparing for the band’s next gig, Jake gets a call that his grandmother suffered an injury after the pipes burst at his father’s temple, and now she’s laying on the couch during the day (she just has a sprained ankle which is going to prevent her from leading the temple’s children’s choir). After checking in with his family and surveying the damage at temple, Jake sees Nikki across the way (her dad’s church is directly opposite Jake’s dad’s temple) and offers to help her carry a heavy box into the building. He’s surprised that she’s still holding a bit of a grudge against him two decades later, but he’s as cordial with her as he can be. But there is a huge issue — with temple having no heat and busted water pipes, they will have nowhere to hold their Hanukkah services, and the choir will have no leader with grandma laid up. It turns out that the last night of Hanukkah and Christmas Eve fall on the same day this year, so Reverend Roberts offers to let Rabbi Cohen use the church for their service which will finish in time for them to start the Christmas Eve service. There’s still the matter of the choir and somehow Grandma Markle tricks Jake into volunteering to lead the children, which Nikki finds to be hilarious.

The rivalry between Nikki and Jake spills over into the choir rehearsals, with each trying to outdo the other with as much noise as possible. Their fathers have to drag them both to the office and have a talk to get them to focus on the kids, which they agree to, but one of Nikki’s choir members notifies her that he’s quitting because they were promised this would all be fun and so far it isn’t. That leaves her with three children to Jake’s five, and their mothers come up with the idea of combining the choirs and the services to embody the true spirit of the holidays. As Jake and Nikki are forced to work together, they also begin to realize that maybe whatever happened so long ago no longer matters, and they embrace the challenge ahead of them. And to help the temple raise money for the repairs, they will make the combined services a fundraiser with a bake sale and other activities. One activity is a bowling night, and Jake offers Nikki a challenge — if his team wins, she has to sing in front of the entire bowling alley. She counters with an offer for him, but when the big moment comes, Nikki missed her spare. If Jake rolls another strike, he wins but he can see how upset she is about having to sing so he intentionally rolls a gutterball, saving her from the trauma. This shows her that maybe he’s not so bad after all, and as they come together to compose the big finale song, a mash-up of something for Hanukkah and Christmas which they title ‘Oy to the World’, they realize that after all this time there might be a romantic spark as well. But Jake gets a call from his bandmate Dave that they have secured a meeting with a record exec on Christmas Eve, which wasn’t supposed to happen until after their upcoming concert, but he doesn’t want to leave as that is the night of the service. He tells Nikki about the meeting, and while she is sad about it, she knows that this is something he’s waited twenty years for and she would never expect him to stay, even though the whole presentation hinges on the two of them doing a duet with the choir. Will Jake follow his dream? Can Nikki dig deep and do the performance or will she panic and cancel? Or will this holiday season provide yet another miracle that makes everything perfect (even though the fathers keep trying to tell Nikki that nothing is ever perfect and just go with it)?

Of all th Hallmark movies presented so far this year, Oy to the World! is definitely among the top three movies the network has broadcast. The script by Rick Garman smartly gives Nikki and Jake a long history, so this isn’t one of those romance movies where the leads meet and fall in love in less than a week. They knew each other as kids, their families talk about them all the time, and even when they finally talk about why they were angry with each other in the first place it didn’t seem that major, so it was easy for them to let go. And as they both had similar musical interests, it just made their chemistry all the more natural and believable. Perhaps Jake’s mother and grandmother are a bit too overly drawn, becoming caricatures of Jewish women, but there is still a wonderful sense of family for both the Cohens and the Robertses. The story also does a wonderful job of showing how two different cultures can still come together for a holiday celebration that is about miracles, and how the two congregations are willing to embrace the other, showing a real sense of community, respect and love, letting their differences in beliefs actually bring them together as one. What better message for a holiday movie this time of year, regardless of the holiday being celebrated? The relationships between the families feel real, and the budding romance for Jake and Nikki builds naturally over the course of the nine days they have to put together a program. In the end, you can’t help but feel completely emotional and uplifted, the joy of the season washing over you. Director Paula Elle makes great use of all of the locations and draws some wonderful performance from her cast.

Hallmark Channel

And that cast! I’m just going to put this out there and say you could not find two more likable actors on Hallmark than Brooke D’Orsay and Jake Epstein. D’Orsay does a great job at showing the chip on Nikki’s shoulder when Jake shows up, but she’s never a total mean girl about it. She is perfectly happy with her life — or so she says — but D’Orsay just gives enough in her performance to let us know that Nikki has simply convinced herself that she’s happy in the life she chose. She also manages to show the subtle ways in which Nikki begins to see Jake as not an adversary, but a colleague, a friend and then someone she really has feelings for because of how kind he always is to her (after they get past the initial rehearsal period of trying to drown out the other), and all the encouragement he offers to get her to sing again. When she looks at Jake and smiles, you just feel the love coming off of her. Epstein as well is equally terrific. His Jake, perhaps, has a little more understanding of Nikki. She gave up her dream, but Jake has been following his, only mildly successfully. But he never gave up and it’s he who encourages Nikki to stop pushing her dreams away. Epstein is as affable as they come, he can handle the funny moments with great skill, he can pour on the emotion when he needs to, and that moment when Jake throws the game so as not to put Nikki in a bad situation, the way he looks at her just tells you all you need to know about how Jake feels. As they both begin to grow closer, D’Orsay and Epstein totally have you in the palm of their hands, and we are all on board for these two to find that love together that they’ve both been looking for. Just some fabulous performances.

Stella Rusich and Patti Allan are wonderful as Jake’s mother and grandmother. They are written a bit over-the-top but they make the characters funny while being respectful. When Jake arrives and Grandma Sarah keeps trying to jump off the couch to make him something to eat, Allan’s performance just makes you laugh out loud. But she also brings some wisdom to the role as she tries to guide Jake down the right path to Nikki and also encourages him to not put his own dreams aside. Rusich also has a funny scene when Jake brings Nikki to dinner and he tells her exactly what his mother is going to say and how she should react — talk about the weather. It’s a neutral subject. David Julian Hirsh is also wonderful as Jake’s father, Rabbi Levi, a kind and wise man, and one who knows when to be quiet but still able to speak volumes with his facial expressions. Shaye Quinn and Harrison Coe, as Nikki’s parents Cynthia and Paul, are also wonderful, with Quinn having some nice scenes with Rusich as they attempt to bring their kids together, while Coe also works well with Hirsh as they try to keep Nikki and Jake on track for the service. Curtis Lovell also has some humorous moments as Jake’s inept bandmate Dave, always delivering some kind of facts to Jake which Jake then has to tell him are completely wrong, like the date and time of their next gig. Everyone in the cast just makes the most of their characters, and they all bring a real sense of joy to their work.

Hallmark has been up and down this year with some truly wonderful holiday movies and some that are truly meh, but make no mistake — Oy to the World! is a top tier production with terrific direction and production design, a witty script that nicely balances the comedy and drama, giving the whole thing a truly authentic warmth that allows you to connect with each and every character, showing what the holidays should really be about, and it has one of the best ensemble casts of any Hallmark movie this year, with two of the most charming leads anyone could hope for. Oy to the World! is a true holiday delight, and to that we say, ‘Mazel tov!’

Oy to the World! has a run time of 1 hour 24 minutes, is rated TV-G, and is streaming on Hallmark+.

Preview – Oy to the World!