Furry Tails with A Twist
By Jennifer Hickok DeFratis
Co-produced by Dragonfly Theatre
Reviewed by Frank Whitaker
Entire contents copyright © 2010 Frank Whitaker. All rights reserved.
For those parents wanting to acquaint their pre-teenage children with the theater, they will find the Alley Theater for Young Audiences’ and Dragonfly Theatre’s presentation of “Furry Tails with a Twist” provides the occasion. Playing to a nearly-full house, the production makes use of some extra conventions to keep their young audience engaged: a snack bar providing sodas, fresh popcorn, candy and apples; two dozen tables, their tops covered in brown, scrap-paper, had crayons for doodling; and a rocking-horse in the back of the space, whose saddle seldom was empty throughout the pre-show time.
The engaging story is about two actresses (Dana Hope and Michelle Lori) performing the classic fairy-tales; however, Alex (Ms. Lori) accidentally drops the unbounded script, and the ensuing forty-five minutes is a hilarious combination of the best known Grimm tales, told through puppets, props, trash and audience participation. But the show was not without instruction, as recycling, “going green”, and energy conservation messages were sporadically expressed.
Goldy-socks (Ms. Hope) – so-named because of “budget issues” – wanders the woods to discover the Three Wolves’ House, where after dining on the temperature-varying bowls of porridge, she falls asleep in the baby’s bed, the one made of straw. Mama and Papa’s beds are made of bricks and sticks, respectively. Another involved Rapunzel escaping her tower to live with seven dwarves. Still another was the troll and the bridge, the troll being a pig (Ms. Lori) with a taste for garbage a’ la Oscar the Grouch. A dwarf (Ms. Hope) not unlike David the Gnome, must pretend to be a troll bartering trash to cross the bridge. The most entertaining sketch was a take on the three pigs, here being bears, with kids from the audience pretending to be the three, whose Mama Bear (Ms. Hope) instructs them to go out into the world and build their houses out of environmentally safe materials: fruit rinds and peels, union-built steel, and recovered play-ground sidewalk festooned in chalk drawings. By the by, the ‘Big, Bad Wolf’ is now a Billie-goat. The impromptu highlight of the performance had one of the precocious bears punching the goat in the stomach after she blew down his union-built house.
Parents can relax and enjoy this amusing production while the target audience remains engaged and, most of all, learns a thing or two, to boot.
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| Dana Hope & Mchelle Lori in Furry Tails with A Twist. Photo courtesy of Art Sanctuary at Alley Theatre. |
Furry Tails with A Twist
August 14 and 21, 2010
Art Sanctuary at Alley Theatre
1205 East Washington St.
Louisville, KY 40202
502-589-3866
Art Sanctuary at Alley Theatre