<b>✭✭✭✭</b>✩
<b>written and directed by Ins Choi, Raquel Duffy, Ken MacKenzie, Gregory Prest and Mike Ross
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
November 6-December 2, 2012
</b>
“When I grow up, I’m going to be a Child.” <i>Dennis Lee</i>
For an hour of exuberant family fun you cannot do better than Soulpepper’s new production of <i>Alligator Pie</i>. Based on the children’s poems of beloved Canadian writer Dennis Lee, the production is as inventive and full of amusing ideas as Lee’s poems. The pomes are chosen from Lee’s work from <i>Alligator Pie</i> (1974) to <i>The Cat and the Wizard</i> (2001). For children the show is a great introduction to both poetry and theatre. For adults it will re-awaken memories of what play was like before the digital revolution.
When you enter the medium-sized Michael Young Theatre at the Young Centre, you find that the theatre has been arranged, for the first time I can remember, in arena style with the audience surrounding the stage on all four sides. For a show aimed at children this is a great idea since it brings the action closer to a higher percentage of the audience. Designer Ken MacKenzie has painted the floor with a mélange of red, yellow and green as if the colours had been spilled there by accident. With a trap door entrance in the middle, the stage is like a large (public) attic where the cast goes to play. In each of the four corners of the square, blocking no one’s view, are what looks like boxes of children’s toys and random junk and old clothing. It turns out that these piles contain almost all the costumes and props the cast will need for the next hour.
“Controlled chaos” might well be the watchword for the whole show. The cast wear a mishmash of parts of costumes seemingly from other Soulpepper shows. Ins Choi has on pyjamas with a tie. Raquel Duffy is wearing a petticoat <i>over</i> her skirt. Mike Ross in is Victoria garb with a frock coat and top hat, except that he has on cowboy boots. Throughout the action they change bits of clothing – at one point Gregory Prest dons an Elizabethan-style doublet – but the idea is that the five actors appear to wear whatever they want according to their fancy. The effect is that they seem to be youngsters who have stumbled across a treasure trove of old clothes and have fun just trying everything on.
This costume style matches the eclecticism of the songs. Musical styles range from near classical ballad to jump rope chant, to rap, to country and western to doo-wop and more. If it seems familiar it’s because the same idea was used in the Soulpepper Academy’s production of <i><a href="perma://BLPageReference/2689CB35-00A5-4C90-A83B-FF838A05BA94">(re)birth: E. E. Cummings in Song</a></i> last year. I found it didn’t work well with e.e cummings since his poetry is not only written in free verse but is eccentric use of spacing on the page creates a visual dimension the musical setting ignored completely. Dennis Lee’s poetry for children is different. It not only is already stanzaic but heavily rhythmic and thus lends itself perfectly for the kind of repetitive structure that musician Mike Ross and his comrades prefer.
The varied musical styles are matched by varied instrumentation, played by the performers on both real and found instruments. Ross plays the guitar, Choi the ukulele and Prest the clarinet. Four of them play real brass instruments deliberately to make an amusingly awful racket rather than music. More fun, however, inspired no doubt by shows like <i>Stomp</i> and <i>Blue Man Group</i>, is the use of found instruments. Four cast members thump on anything at hand to make the beat so that Ins Choi can rap the song <i>Tricking</i>, about a boy who won’t eat what he should at dinner. The cast finds in their corners a collection of plastic tubes of different lengths and after much switching plays <i>Chopsticks</i> with them. Duffy takes a collection of office supplies – a scissors, staplers, a three-hole punch, and some packing tape – out of her carpet bag that soon become the accompaniment to <i>I Put a Penny in My Purse</i> sung as a tango by Gregory Prest, with Ross clicking the staplers like castanets. At the end of the show they put bubble wrap to rollickingly percussive use.
Except for Choi’s <i>Tricking</i>, Duffy’s song about trying unsuccessfully to do away with her brother the brat and Prest’s song about the hole in his purse, most of the songs are about the pleasures of having a friend. A monster (Prest) reads stories about elves and an elf (Choi) reads stories about monsters until they turn around to discover they are reading in the same room. A wizard (Ross with a taped-on violin case for a hat) bemoans the fact that no one is interested in wizards anymore, while a cat (Duffy with a boa stuck into the waistband of her dress) lives in Casa Loma and holds dinner parties which no one but she attends. Luckily, they eventually find one another. Ross and Duffy sing about the joys of playing with a friend while Choi and Prest turn the umbrellas in each hand into a flock of birds, a protective shield, wheels on a car and much else.
All five performers clearly have better access to their inner child than most people and their acting is devoid of the clichés adult actors often use when portraying children. Mike Ross is clearly the most musical of the group, followed by Gregory Prest, who turns out to have a lovely singing voice. Ken MacKenzie, best known as a designer, is the only one whose diction is unclear.
The show, like Lee’s poetry, captures the free range of children’s imagination that can transform anything into anything else – a hula hoop into a puddle, beach balls into percussion instruments into planets – an imagination the performers use in creating the show and that we use in interpreting their creation. Children will enjoy the fun and adults will feel rejuvenated. Let’s hope the adults seeing the show will realize how important this unfettered imagination was for them and still is for children. Let’s hope the show encourages them to encourage their children to play as children used to play, making up their own adventures, rather than merely consuming pre-programmed games that exercise the thumbs but not the mind.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a <i>Stage Door</i> exclusive.
Photo: Raquel Duffy, Ins Choi, Mike Ross and Ken Mackenzie. ©2012 Jason Hudson.
For tickets, visit <a href="http://www.soulpepper.ca">www.soulpepper.ca</a>.
<b>2012-11-07</b>
<b>Alligator Pie</b>