Photo by Chris van der Schyf
Guided storytelling at its finestby Jason Booker
If you don’t leave this show with a grin on your face, you must be dead.
Even people who aren’t particularly fans of Maurice Sendak’s nearly wordless classic picture-book, Where the Wild Things Are, will be touched by the truly wonderful feeling created by this show. Presentation House Theatre of Vancouver brings their production of this guided play experience to the intimate studio space of Toronto’s Young People’s Theatre for the March Break, directed and adapted by Kim Selody for a slightly larger audience than the original British version intended. But it works.
A warning though: be prepared to participate. Shoes and coats are removed at the door. Kids sit on colour-coded tarps acting as islands. The scenery, props and costumes heavily borrow their sketchy aesthetic and colourful leafy style from a Sendak illustration, created by Linda Leon here. But really, this isn’t a show about the stage magic (though a number of kids loved the first noticeable lighting shift to night in my audience) – it’s about the magic of storytelling, imagination and performance.
