Colourful production will mesmerize kids

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 15/03/2019 (2719 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s story time again!

Nova Scotia’s Mermaid Theatre was in Winnipeg just last year with a stage production of the Margaret Wise Brown storybook double bill Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny. It returns to the stage at MTYP with a triple-feature based on the stories of Eric Carle, in order: Little Cloud, The Mixed-Up Chameleon and the titular The Very Hungry Caterpillar. (The total run time is less than 60 minutes, making for a succinct triple bill indeed.)

The same esthetic holds: Mermaid uses black light and fluorescent colours for a visual presentation that pops. Two able puppeteers, Ben Leger and Andrew Young, are dressed from head to toe in black so they can disappear into the black background. They manipulate both puppets and sets to give animated life to the tableaus of Carle’s illustrations.

It’s targeted for kids aged three to eight, and after witnessing a Thursday afternoon performance in front of an audience of elementary school kids, one imagines it offers the same pleasures to them as when an adult sees a good movie adaptation of a favourite novel.

With a canned audio reading by Gordon Pinsent — Canada’s grandpa — and music by Steven Naylor, it makes for a lavishly embellished story time that causes oohs and ahhs among the small fry.

In the first story, Little Cloud, when the title vapour changes shapes into a sheep (“sheep and clouds sometime look alike”) or an airplane or a shark, the kids were visibly thrilled with each iteration. In a day and age when kid-centred media tends to be set on sensory overload, it’s warmly reassuring to see kids so engaged in back-to-basics theatric display.

The other stories have the advantage of having a little more plot than the Runaway Bunny stories. The Mixed-Up Chameleon is about a colour-changing lizard who sees other animals and tries to emulate what makes them special — the long neck of the giraffe, the shell of the turtle, the trunk of the elephant. He turns himself into a comically grotesque spectacle before he realizes he’s better off just being a chameleon. It’s an elegant lesson in self-acceptance.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar offers up a story of how a young caterpillar leaves his egg and snarfs down different meals every day of the week — an apple on Monday, two pears on Tuesday, three plums on Wednesday — and so on. It culminates in a glorious transition at the climax, a visual thrill that allows director and designer Jim Morrow a three-dimensional realization of Carle’s charming and colourful illustrations.

One issue is that the piece is very much tied to its canned soundtrack, and that doesn’t allow the puppeteers much wiggle room (pardon the caterpillar pun) to accomodate the audience’s reaction. If the kids’ audible appreciation of the spectacle drowns out Pinsent’s readings, well, you’re out of luck.

Then again, we can be thankful for theatre that elicits that kind of reaction in the first place.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing