Oct. 26, 2011 - Issue #836: Winter Guide 2011
Pinocchio
Thu, Oct 27 – Sun, Oct 30; Fri, Nov 4 (7 pm) Sat, Oct 29; Sun, Oct 30 (2 pm), Arts Barns, $12.50 – $18
Yet audiences saw few, if any, of these things with their eyes. The letters were pulling images out of the children's imaginations, put there by the company's versatile brand of storytelling: actors that double as guides to the world they see around them, sets that require more imagination than flats. These were things that, Timoteo notes "we assured to them were there [laugh], but really weren't.
"Our greatest resource with our audience is that they have the wildest, most wonderful imaginations in the world," he says. "So if we can use that to our advantage, we get something better than anything we could've built."
Still, Timoteo and composer Jeff Unger—who've been knocking out Sterling-nominated-or-winning adaptations of classic fairy tales, for a number of years now—had put off approaching Pinocchio because, frankly, there's so much imagination necessary. The story of the little wooden boy trying to trade his branch arms in for real ones is an expansive, locale-swapping tale—sweeping from Italian countryside to the belly of a sea creature—that doesn't lend itself well to a minimal set that has to be transported from school to school. "He's continuously running into antagonists," Timoteo points out. "It's very Odyssey-like: it's one episode to the next."
But returning to the source material—Carlo Collodi's 1883 novel —and challenging the cast to stretch the number of roles they could fathom playing onstage proved that restrictions can yield their own ingenious rewards. Plenty of strings to manage here, but none held them down.
"If we know that we can't build 15 different sets that take place throughout Italy, we have to really bash our heads together and make ourselves conceive of a theatrical device or some theatrical devices that allow us to present or imply Italy as underwater, or inside of a shark, or all these different things, in a very barebones way, that doesn't allow lights or anything like that," he says. "It can be really tough, but I always find, year after year after year, that I'm really grateful for it. It's very rewarding, 'cause once we've found a way to do it, we're glad that we didn't have lights to just go, 'Scene change!' The scene changes have to be a story as well."
Thu, Oct 27 – Sun, Oct 30; Fri, Nov 4 (7 pm)
Sat, Oct 29; Sun, Oct 30 (2 pm)
Adapted by Farren Timoteo and Jeff Unger
Arts Barns, $12.50 – $18
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