Fish tales at Wheelock

Margaret Ann Brady and Andrea Ross cavort amid Stacey Stephens's terrific costumes in The Little Mermaid.

The Wheelock Family Theatre's new production of The Little Mermaid gets so much right that I felt a little guilty about not liking it more. Director/designer James P. Byrne's solutions to the problems of evoking swirling schools of fish and scuttling squads of crabs, not to mention the shimmering, sinuous tails of the titular heroine and her friends, were always delightful, and the armies of kids impersonating these undersea denizens always charmed. Indeed, the show's at its strongest in the imaginative extravaganzas between its scenes, when iridescent fish swim about the auditorium, their tails twirling like kites as they poke about audience members as if they were so many stands of coral.

And you couldn't fault the production's adult cast, either: Andrea Ross made an appealing "Pearl" (not "Ariel," more on that later), and Margaret Ann Brady chewed the reefery just as she should as the Sea Witch. There were also hilarious pratfalls from Ricardo Engermann, and generally the performances were lightly comic and gently graceful.

The trouble is that the script, by Linda Daugherty, isn't quite seaworthy. Parents should note that this is not the popular Disney musical - despite a single song and a variety of music cues - but rather an attempt to meld its family-friendly revisionism with some of the dark drama of the Hans Christian Andersen original. Like the Brothers Grimm, Andersen favored tales that are grim indeed by modern standards, and often end with suffering (and explicit moralizing). Indeed, in her first incarnation, the Little Mermaid not only didn't get the Prince, but died for her efforts and dissolved into sea-foam. This turned out to be a bit much even for Andersen; he later revised the story to allow her some Little-Match-Girl-like redemption in the afterlife.

Adapter Daugherty clearly wants to temper the feel-good, you-can-have-it-all vibe of the Disney version with the sense of sacrifice (if not the religiosity) of the original. Which is certainly a laudable goal. The trouble is that beat by stumbling beat, Daugherty can't really pull it off, and she basically tries to keep the Disney tone (and pump up a gentle environmentalism) while smuggling in some of Andersen's old-school sexual vengeance without ever really harming - or even touching - "Pearl." It doesn't quite work, but the kids probably won't notice that. You may notice, however, that their focus tends to drift in between the appearances of the scary eels and the rainbow fish.

Still, there are those scary eels and those rainbow fish. And of course the good folks at Wheelock are also keeping a large number of local actors working. And is The Little Mermaid better than another trip to the multiplex? Yes, it is. You could do worse on a rainy day than taking a dip in this gentle, well-intentioned effort.

The Grinch does Seussical

There are some children's shows that delight both parent and child. Like Peter Pan. Or maybe Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Seussical isn't one of those shows.

And there's no question as to why - to an adult eye, the good doctor has obviously left the building. True, his crunchy advocacy of the small, vulnerable, eccentric and fuzzy has remained intact, as well as his scorn for conformism, militarism, and the malice of the lonely ego. But somehow all his sly satire has been drained away, as well as his tighter-than-a-Who's-you-know-what storytelling. To be blunt, in their attempt to stitch together several Seussian tales, the writers of Seussical have come up with a train wreck; it may be positive and empowering, but it's a train wreck just the same. And this is supposed to be the revised, focused version. I can't imagine what played on Broadway.


Andrew Barbato and Sirena Abalian go places in Seussical.

Still, I am duty bound to report that about five hundred little critics I saw the show with didn't really care. Note I said the show was not delightful for both parent and child. But for child alone, it seems to do the job; the kids around me were pretty happy with it as a parade of their favorite characters sans any coherent narration. If a random Who or Sneetch dropped by to say his most famous line for no reason whatsoever, well, they were down with that and it was awesome.

So the kids who saw Seussical liked it a lot; but the Grinch, who looked down his nose at it, did not. Or something like that. But you might find yourself thinking some Grinchy thoughts yourself as you recall the frisky reversals and bemused bits of wordplay (not to mention the signature meter and rhyme) that have been largely deleted from the show, and replaced with bland, uplifting doggerel and so-so pop numbers. But just look into your little Cindy Lou's bright eyes at moments like that and remember that you're doing your duty as a parent.

And it must be said that the good people at the Wheelock Family Theatre have done their best to keep this show from laying an egg, green or otherwise, and the solid cast goes through its paces with high spirits and resolve. I wouldn't call the direction or design actually inspired, but they're big and bright and get the job done. The sound system likewise is far from ideal, but the musical performances are generally strong. And there a number of very good acting turns.

Indeed, at the show's center is a real charmer: young Sirena Abalian can not only act, sing, and dance, but does so with a sweet self-possession that makes everything around her seem slightly fake and overblown (which it is). Still, many of the actors who dare to share the stage with her emerge from the encounter unscathed, and some even steal a few - well, if not scenes then maybe a few minutes of scenes. Young Andrew Barbato makes the Cat in the Hat more of a bemused Willy-Wonka-like impresario than a potent anarchic force, but he's got the polish and flash to hold our (and the kids') wandering interest. As Horton, a kind of double-player in the show (which fumblingly mixes Horton Hatches the Egg and Horton Hears a Who! with bits of other books) Kamau M. Hashim better matches his character's established persona, and turns in a lovely, gently-scaled performance. He's paired with two other local stars, the amusingly ditzy Jennifer Beth Glick as Gertrude McFuzz and the bold, bright Angela Williams as Mayzie La Bird, and there's more good, broad work from the reliable Peter A. Carey as General Genghis Khan Schmitz.

So perhaps there's something in Seussical even for those old enough to remember when Oh, the Places You'll Go! was as young as its current readers. But I'm sorry to think of all the places Seussical could have gone, but doesn't.

Maid to order

Joan (Andrea Ross) is blessed by the Archbishop (James Bodge) in Saint Joan.

Stuart Little and Our Town fans must be doing quite the double take at the Wheelock Family Theatre this season: the current mainstage show is Saint Joan, by George Bernard Shaw, a lengthy late work that's long on dialectic and a little short on family fun.

But hey, I'm not complaining; Boston hasn't seen Saint Joan, I think, since a Huntington production some twenty years ago, and although the play isn't top-drawer Shaw, it still rocks a lot harder than, say, Rock 'n' Roll, the Huntington's latest offering. By some sad coincidence, all the really interesting plays so far this season have been at least twenty-five years old; what that says about our mania for "new work" I'll leave to my readers' imaginations. Suffice to say, three cheers for the Wheelock for resuscitating Saint Joan, and in such handsome form (the subtle, detailed set is by Anita Fuchs) - even if some artistic corners seem to have been cut for the sake of accessibility.

Not that the text seems particularly abridged - but as Joan, the Wheelock has cast the talented Andrea Ross, who's the right age, and with whom the Wheelock's audiences can easily identify, but who's nevertheless utterly wrong for the part. Ms. Ross is a pretty, healthy, modern teenager who's smart but prone to pout; Joan, on the other hand, was a gender-bending live wire whose history-changing charisma no doubt derived - as such power generally does - from unresolved psychological issues. Not only did she hear voices from the Great Beyond (as in my favorite painting of her, by Jules Bastien-Lepage, below), but she was both maniacal about her virginity and all but bent on dressing and acting like a man - in particular, like a warrior (which was far more transgressive in Orleans in 1428 than it is at Newton North today).



It's true that Shaw himself leaves these issues largely unexplored; as always, he's fascinated by feminine charisma without wanting to delve too closely into its sources (catch-all causes like "The Life Force" will suffice). But his larger social thesis - that saints are both necessary and impossible - nevertheless depends on an exciting but insufferable Joan, and it's hard to see how the likeable Ms. Ross could fill that bill. Productions generally rely on older, more experienced actresses to project the requisite intensity - Carl Dreyer's film, for instance (see clip below), which only a few years after Shaw's premiere would eclipse his play - depends in no small degree on the almost frightening commitment of its star, Maria Falconetti.


Dreyer's intense The Passion of Joan of Arc , with Maria Falconetti and Antonin Artaud (climax above).

On the other hand, could the Wheelock's audience relate to such a complex, unstable figure? Hard to say. But I was struck by how closely the kids over 11 or so followed this production - which was a good thing, because without a compelling Joan, a production must rely on the clever combat of Shaw's dialogue. Here the Wheelock actors generally did a solid, but not sparkling, job. Alas, a certain tendency to view congregations of dead white males as necessarily dark in the their intents diluted the moral complexity of the proceedings, and made Shaw's longest debate a bit wearying even for me. Still, several actors brought astonishing conviction to their roles. Shelley Bolman often charmed as the milquetoast Dauphin (the historical one was actually quite a bit less charming - here, as elsewhere in Saint Joan, Shaw re-purposes characters from his earlier hits rather than devising new ones). And there were appealing performances from De'Lon Grant and Gerard Slattery, as well as a detailed and confident - but perhaps too arch - one from Bill Mootos. The most memorable turn, however, came from Luis Negron, whose anguish at the realization that whatever his rationale, he had essentially burnt to death an innocent child, was utterly compelling. Negron's final scenes gave some sense of how powerful even minor Shaw can truly be.