Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 3/7/2019 (510 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
The locals in Hamdad Productions have taken a stab at a theatrical adaptation of Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith’s 1992 children’s book, which takes popular fairy tales and myths (Jack and the Beanstalk, Cinderella, The Princess and the Pea, Rumpelstiltskin, etc.) and mashes and twists them into familiar but altogether new stories.
Parts of the 55-minute show brought big laughs, with Sam Kowaluk (who played a prince, the giant from Jack and the Beanstalk and the titular Stinky Cheese Man) delivering a riotous, raucous performance that had young and old in the audience in stitches. (Narrator Scott Austin was also consistently good.) Other portions of the show seemed a bit muddled.
A 2017 review of the troupe’s Horrible Histories for the Free Press noted the performers could have used microphones, and two years later the same problem remains. About one-third of the troupe projected well enough to hear over the young audience, while a few performers were barely audible at all.
—Ben MacPhee-Sigurdson