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Wood Boy Dog Fish
Reviewed by Neal Weaver
At Bootleg Theatre
Through December 12.
RECOMMENDED:
Carlo Collodi’s 19th Century children’s book, The Adventures of Pinocchio, has been largely over-shadowed for modern audiences by Disney’s movie adaptation, which turned it into a sentimental moral tale.
But Collodi’s original was made of sterner stuff: darker, crueler and more disturbing. The hapIess Puppet gets his feet burnt off, and the villains pack some real menace. And when the Cricket appears on the scene, he’s immediately stomped on by the Puppet. Take that, Walt Disney!
In Wood Boy Dog Fish, director Sean T. Cawelti and his cohorts at Rogue Artists Ensemble have gone back to the Italian original for inspiration.
Many of the familiar elements are present, including the puppet’s nose-that-grows when he tells lies and the children at Funland (Disney’s Pleasure Island) who are transformed into donkeys (here they’re donkey-shaped piñatas and get violently dismembered). There are also the Dogfish (Jeremy Charles Hohn), the puppet-maker Geppetto (Ben Messmer), and the Blue Fairy (Nina Silver).
But in this updated revisionist version, they’ve undergone a sea-change. Geppetto has become a commitment-phobic alcoholic, and the Blue Fairy is transformed into a strange young woman with blue hair – called simply Blue – who carries a torch for Geppetto and urges the runaway Puppet to return home. The Dogfish (Disney’s Monstro the Whale) has become a sort of all-purpose villain who feasts on fear, and also a fish in a business suit – a tycoon-entrepreneur who mass-markets all kinds of commodities, yet is still able to swallow the Puppet through his gaping jaws.
The earlier scenes are largely a grab-bag in which we almost lose track of the original tale, but later it returns to the rescue of Geppetto and, touchingly, the final transformation when, the Puppet becomes a real boy (Rudy Martinez) at last. (Curiously, Pinocchio is referred to only as the Puppet till the very end, when Blue gives him his name—which is never mentioned, though it is implied.)
The spectacle, which is indeed often spectacular, is provided by a host of artists. Francois-Pierre Couture’s set combines solid scenic elements in naïve-primitive style, with animated projections. The puppeteers provide many sequences, including a sort of aerial ballet of toothy Siamese Fighting Fish, with their filmy fins. And the Puppet is manipulated, in Japanese Bunraku style, by black-clad puppeteers. The script is by Chelsea Sutton and the music was composed by Ego Plum and Adrian Prevost, with choreography by Nat Hodges. The sometimes grotesque masks are by Cawelty, and the costumes by Kerry Hennesy and Lori Meeker. And there are solid performances by a large ensemble of actors and puppeteers.
The production is billed as being for mature audiences, but the early curtain time for evening performances seems designed for children. Some parents may object to the level of violence and occasional bits of rough language, but the few kids in the audience seemed unfazed by it.
Bootleg Theatre, 2220 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles. Schedule variable. Thurs.-Sat. 7 p.m. Sat.-Sun. 2 p.m. Nov. 28-29 (dark Nov. 26 & 27); through Dec. 12. (213) 596-9468; www bootlegtheatre.org; Running time approximately 95 minutes with a 10 minute intermission
