Journey into magic wardrobe delivers valuable lessons

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/12/2023 (689 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When the school-aged audience arrive at the Manitoba Theatre for Young People Thursday morning for a preview performance of Narnia, the children walk in from the cold and hang their jackets on hangers, stuffing their tuques and mitts into their pockets and marching through the stage doors to boldly venture into a different world.

Not long after, the honourable and trustworthy Lucy (Shelayna Christante) makes the same journey in reverse, weaving her way through “coats on coats on coats on coats” into the wintry world of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia.

In Bad Hats Theatre’s retelling of Lewis’s classic chronicles, the children who explore an alternate universe deep inside an armoire are not siblings, at least not in the biological sense. Lucy, Edmund (Ben Ridd), Susan (Kara Joseph) and Peter (Deivan Steele) are orphans, forced to come together as members of a “found family” after dealing with separate losses.

Lucy is honest, Susan is fierce, Peter is rational and Edmund is unpredictable. The actors, particularly Joseph and Ridd, fill these roles with gusto.

Shortly after the audience members find their seats, the children arrive at what seems to be an abandoned house, filled with sealed cardboard boxes, barren coat trees and furniture draped in sheets. Set in the round, there are no walls, but there is a leafy carpet, evoking a verdant forest floor.

These are all the pieces director Fiona Sauder and designer Julia Kim require to transport the four children on stage, and the dozens of them watching from the wings, to the other side, a kingdom of fanciful creatures ruled with an icy fist by the White Witch (a beguiling Elena Howard-Scott).

Loaded with peppy, propulsive original songs, Narnia sticks close to the source material when it comes to narrative, but Bad Hats’ bare-bones approach to devised theatre relies on imagination, versatility and commitment.

As Aslan (Melanie Whyte) says, “Everything in the world exists because somebody imagined it.”

Whyte plays double duty, cast as the messianic lion as well as the kindly professor who lived alone in the mansion until the orphans’ arrival.

Whyte makes an immediate effort to connect with the children in the audience — she looks directly into their eyes and reaches out to check if they’re ghosts — which is imperative. After that, there’s no denying we’re all in the same place, though the orphans likely wish they weren’t.

Moving homes is never easy, especially when it isn’t by choice. The three eldest children are at first ready to settle into the next phase of their lives, but Lucy isn’t quite there yet. She runs through a twirling, whirling wall of winter gear and lands on the other side, greeted by a self-deprecating faun (a perfectly persnickety Chase Winnicky, who also plays one half of a domesticated beaver couple.)

Just as the children do, the actors are often required to live in two worlds, providing the instrumentation for their own soundtrack as the story develops around and through them.

Whyte tickles the ivories, as do Winnicky and Joseph, while Steele and Howard-Scott trade off on the violin. Duncan Cox, who is quickly becoming one of the city’s most reliable musical theatre performers, plays Mr. Beaver and the acoustic guitar. Utility man Kevin Forster — in addition to playing the White Witch’s aide de camp and Reepicheep the warrior mouse — strums the guitar, plinks the piano, does percussion work and plays the trumpet.

While the music is brilliantly played by the cast and well-orchestrated by Landon Doak, an unfortunate reality of the scale of the production is that the lyrics — certainly clever and narratively valuable — are sometimes difficult to hear on opening night because of the physical placement of the accompaniment, which is spread throughout the theatre. This does create an all-encompassing soundscape, but the words can be lost on certain segments of the audience depending on their proximity to the vocal performances.

That can be forgiven, though, because the production capably fills the room, engaging the audience and forcing them to turn their heads in order to keep up with the action as it spreads to the catwalks and into the audience.

Meanwhile, some inspired propwork is at play. In one instance, upturned books become the flapping wings of an army of birds. And although Forster does the voice for Reepicheep, who could definitely use more stage time, the mouse is actually a knee-high wooden creature on wheels who Forster pushes around like a vacuum cleaner.

The mission in Narnia is for the children to fulfil a prophecy and end the White Witch’s eternal winter. But for Bad Hats, who first explored the same idea from different perspectives in their versions of Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland at MTYP, the job is to remind audiences that nothing is permanent, and that no moment or memory serves just one purpose.

“You have many seasons to come, and none should last forever,” the Professor says toward the end of the show, after the wardrobe has been sealed and the house has reverted to its dust-covered inertia.

Once the show ends, the children return to the lobby, remove their coats from the hangers, and walk out into the cold to take on whatever’s to come.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com