Robbin' in da 'Hood

Josh, one of the student employees in our division (at the university where I work), is in the cast of the play Robin Hood ("as retold by Cathryn Pisarski"), a children's theatre production intended to raise money for the University Players to attend theatre conferences. You may already be familiar with the tale: Robin is robbin' from the rich in the (neighbor)hood [sorry--I just had to explain the title of this post somehow] and redistributin' the wealth to the poor. Along the way, he meets and falls in love with Maid Marian, a noblewoman who is out of his league (caste-wise). Robin's nemesis is the greedy, heartless Sheriff of Nottingham . . . played in this production by Josh.

Our family hosted my boss and her daughter for supper and then accompanied them to the play to see Josh on stage. He was quite funny and easily stood out among a cast mostly doing their best with mediocre material and some poor staging choices. In a very Monty Python-esque nod, the Sheriff and the other residents of the stone, castle-like structure (that differentiated those folks from Robin and his pals, who live and hide out in the forest) started the play by entering in a line from the back of the house, sort of skipping to mimic the galloping of horses whilst one of them clomped two coconut half-shells together rythmically. Josh spoke with an inflated, self-important, faux-classical, semi-British accent, portraying the kind of blunderbuss typical of Disney movie villains. His exaggerated black wig had the height and shape of Captain Hook's hair (Peter Pan) had he gone for a Jheri curl and then not washed his locks for a month. Josh's posture and movements supported his comic characterization of the Sheriff, and it fit in well not only with the plot's needs but also with the atmosphere of the play . . . and he appealed easily to the children in the audience.

I was reminded of Marty Feldman in Young Frankenstein and his character's hump each time the Sheriff's assistant Rodrigo entered, severly hunched over and with a noticeable hump on his back. There was a cleverly done archery contest in which the contestants shot imaginary arrows at a target, said "thud" as a cue for the stagehand behind the bullseye, and watched as arrows were pushed out from the back side of the bullseye, looking very much as though they were real arrows that had been shot into the front side of it! There were many other smile-inducing moments, thanks to clever deliveries by the actors and funny bits and "stage business" added to the play.

The pacing of the show overall, however, was hampered--and, often, brought to a screeching halt--by the scene changes. They had built an enormous platform on wheels that, on one side, was a multi-level forest setting and, on the other side (when spun around), was a multi-level castle-like home for the Sheriff and his ilk. It could also be split into two double-sided units so that the forest side could be stage left while the stone side was stage right, visually dividing the stage into two locations at once. Ambitious . . . but ill-conceived and -executed.

Each rotation of the platform or separation-and-rearrangement of it required several moments for the lights to dim, stagehands to enter and release this latch and redo that latch and spin it around or break it apart or move it across stage, props and set pieces to be re-set, and the lights to come back up before the action could resume. Those seconds and minutes add up to an eternity in a show whose many scenes are each pretty short in and of themselves (the whole play, including scene changes, lasted only an hour), meaning the scene changes seemed to last as long as the brief scenes themselves. An audience of kids ought not to be left to wait in the dark multiple times during a children's theatre production. The action of the play should maintain its momentum, unimpeded by scene changes that, were there a less cumbersome set designed, could happen much more quickly and fluidly with hardly an interruption to the pacing of the plot.

(Judgmental much, Kevin?)

There were, however, no complaints from our girls. They have always been excellent audience members, attentive during the play and able afterwards to comment intelligently on it. They especially enjoyed that, following curtain call, the actors remained onstage and invited interested audience members to come up and visit them. The girls brought their programs and had each cast member provide an autograph. They also liked visiting Josh, of course, since they know him. It was, all in all, a fun way to spend a Friday night together as a family (with our friends, too).