Mr. McGee & The Biting Flea at The Children's Theatre Company on 1/22/10
By: Janet Preus
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| Mr. McGee & The Biting Flea publicity photo |
Good children's stories deliver a single, simple but meaningful point, illustrated in an engaging way. CTC follows this precept in its staging of six little stories, including Mr. McGee (represented by a balloon-headed puppet), Alexander the duckling, Belinda the cow, the King and his cooks, and Mary Liz, featuring the audience as a most convincing monster.
Lacking the technical wizardry for which CTC is renowned, but right in the pocket with the imaginative play for which pre-schoolers are renowned, the one-hour performance held a roomful of kindergarten hopefuls in rapt attention. I know this because they all responded in chorus with their scary monster roar right on cue – a good 40 minutes after one quick practice round, and I doubt that the entire audience had read the book.
With a set consisting of over-sized shelves filled with suitcases and the miscellany typical of a storeroom, three performers, Autumn Ness, Reed Sigmund and Max Wojtanowicz, build a “set” for each story. How they do that is as visually interesting (on a pre-school level, of course) as is the simple dilemma each new cast of characters face.
Much of the show is sung – often a cappella, sometimes with little more than an uncomplicated piano accompaniment. But the three-part harmonies in an array of character voices (harder than it sounds, especially picking pitches off the previous song) are just complex enough to provide a fitting superstructure for the action of the play, and were delivered cleanly with little fuss by Ness, Sigmund and Wojtanowicz.
After a small timing kink preceding the first of the six stories, the actors settled in to an easy rhythm, enjoying a lovely rapport with their amazingly well-behaved audience as they rollicked through the show, vaudevillian-style, suggesting that traditions in theater performance must be responding to something fundamental about what holds our attention. And, yes, the armpit fart, a man in a dress and stripping on stage is just as funny to a four-year-old.
Mr. McGee & the Biting Flea runs through February 21.
Location Info:
The Children's Theatre Company
Artist Info: The Children's Theatre Company
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