Bringing forest to stage

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This article was published 12/12/2016 (3219 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba Theatre for Young People’s production of The Jungle Book, an adaptation by Greg Banks of Rudyard Kipling’s story, hits many of the proper notes when it comes to the annual big seasonal offering.

It has strong performances culled from a rich pool of mostly local talent. It has a big, impressive set, designed by Robin Fisher, that facilitates the often-perilous settings of the story. It has humour and action.

But it doesn’t have an especially strong script, possibly because it strives too hard to shield young ones from the ferocious truths found in Kipling’s prose and verse. 

If you haven’t read the book or seen any of the three Disney iterations of the story on film, The Jungle Book is the story of Mowgli (Toronto actor Adriano Sobretodo Jr.), a mere toddler of a boy who enters the jungle alone, promptly coming under the protection of the nurturing Mother Wolf (Jennifer Lyon) when he is stalked by the brutal tiger Shere Khan (Carson Nattrass).  

The “man-cub” Mowgli is raised as a wolf cub until he reaches an age when he is essentially sent to school under the tutelage of the pleasure-seeking old bear Baloo (Cory Wojcik) and the more disciplined panther Bagheera (Kimberley Rampersad). 

Mowgli’s education is threatened when the wilful child breaks from the bear/panther tutelage to take up with a group of mischievous monkeys who promise the lad they will make him their leader. (Lyon, Rampersad, Wojcik and Nattrass all do triple or quadruple duty playing other jungle animals, a trick that mostly involves a change of ears.) Mowgli duly learns his lesson before his final, inevitable reckoning with Shere Khan.

There is much to love here. Rampersad and Nattrass both have long possessed a certain animal grace on the stage, and that facility is well utilized, with seasoned dancer Rampersad making an especially elegant panther and a cheeky monkey. Wojcik gives Baloo the demeanour of an affable blue-collar shlub. (Kids will find him funny and endearing, but for mom and dad, here’s a Baloo with whom you might want to go for a beer.) Lyon, more at home in musical-theatre roles, still manages to look at home slithering seductively as the snake Kaa or exuding maternal warmth as Mowgli’s wolf-mother.

In the role of Mowgli, Sobretodo gets kids onside playing the cute toddler, but as Mowgli grows, it becomes progressively difficult to stick with him, possibly because the actor is perhaps too old for the role (an issue for MTYP two Christmases ago when they cast a Peter Pan in his 40s).

Director Robb Paterson is on a mission to entertain the kids, and he accomplishes this over a challenging 90-minute running time. 

But the play goes awry in diminishing Kipling’s strong mythical elements in favour of something more “accessible.”

When Mowgli fights with Baloo and Bagheera over his relationship with the monkeys, it starts to feel too much like parents venting disapproval over their kid’s bad-influence buddies. It’s sometimes too difficult to reconcile this domesticated iteration with the author who wrote, in the poem The Law for Wolves, “If ye plunder his kill from a weaker, devour not all in thy pride / Pack-right is the right of the meanest; so leave him the head and the hide.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing